Thread by @nicknikolov

Short computer history thread!
- Year: 1968
- Problem: Non-computer specialists at RAND needed to compute but did not know how to type yet
- Solution: A tablet, a stylus and an "iconic" programming environment (duh!)

It was called GRaIL for graphic input language. It was quite powerful, the system was written in itself(!) for example and also included a real-time debugger for the interpreter. 😅

It was able to recognise handwritten characters including Chinese characters! You could draw the character on the tablet and the CRT would display it, its pronunciation and the Chinese-English dictionary entry (all done in milliseconds).

The original "Shake to Undo"?

I mean just look at this. User tried to write "SUBSCAN", the system recognised the last letter as F, then after doing some other random action came back to fix it. 😍

50 years later note-taking apps on my iPad are still using cabinet metaphors. 😬
*Mumbles something about the computer revolution"

Sources:
- archive.org/details/AlanKe… (Alan Kay obviously)
- lively-web.org/users/Dan/uplo…
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAND_Tabl…