We just completed a seminar series called "Beyond 3D"that reviewed ways to put the great models we can now create in SolidWorks to work in new ways. My talk was reviewing where we had come with CAD as a preview to what is next.
I was doing some research for my presentation and I remebered from my Engineering Comptuer Graphics Class at Purdue in the early 80's hearing about the research that Ivan Sutherland did for his PhD Thesis in 1962. His program called Sketchpad had many of the concepts we use in modern CAD systems prototyped out more than 40 years ago. In my research I found this video in the Internet Archive.
It reviews the origins of computer User Interfaces and shows a video of what Sketchpad could do. It is very interesting to see how far things have come, but at the same time how little is new.
