Applicon CAD System with Trainable Hand-Drawn Symbol Recognition

This is an excerpt from a circa 1970 16 mm film. It demonstrates some of the stylus-based interaction techniques used by the Applicon CAD system, developed by Fontaine Richardson.

The Applicon CAD system was likely the first commercial product to use a trainable shape recognizer. The user not only was able to use the stylus, tablet and digital ink to enter CAD data - such as wires - by drawing. They were also able to enter commands by drawing pre-defined shapes or patterns, or ones that they defined themselves.

The first part of this video clip shows some of these in use, and the second part shows how they are defined, along with additional information. The clip is worth watching more than once since, having seen the second part, on second viewing you will better see what you may have missed on the first viewing.

The roots of Applicon, and the techniques demonstrated, grew out of work done in the 1960s at MIT's Lincoln Lab on Wes Clark's TX-2 computer.

For more general information on Lincoln Lab, and its spin-offs, see:

Buxton, William: Resource Page on Early HCI Research by the Lincoln Lab TX-2 Group
http://billbuxton.com/Lincoln.html

Buxton, William (2005). Interaction at Lincoln Laboratory in the 1960's: Looking Forward -- Looking Back . Panel Introduction. Proceedings of the 2005 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI'05 , April 3-7, 2005, 1163-1167.
http://billbuxton.com/LincolnLab.pdf

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Fontaine Richardson
• Lincoln Lab
• TX-2 Computer
• CAD
• free-hand symbol recognition
• Rand Tablet
• interactive computer graphics
• computer history
• graphical interaction
• pen input
• stylus input
• tablet input
• trainable recognizer
• free-hand drawn commands
• digital ink
• Bill BUxton