If you think AutoCad is complicated, what with its terrifying number of keyboard shortcuts, you should check out SketchPad, the world’s first electronic drafting program. Designed by Ivan Sutherland in the 1960s, it allowed an operator to draw line segments, arcs, and circles on an oscilloscope with a lightpen and a complex set of buttons, switches, and knobs. The videos below don’t look like much to our modern eyes, but this was a pretty phenomenal step forward in terms of human-computer interaction.
Thanks to Dvorak for this blast from the past!