Sketchpad – CAD program in 1963 with a graphical user interface This video is a TV show made about the software Ivan Sutherland developed in his 1963 thesis at MIT's Lincoln Labs, "Sketchpad, A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System", described as one of the most influential computer programs ever written. This work was seminal in Human-Computer Interaction, Graphics and Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs), Computer Aided Design (CAD), and contraint/object-oriented programming. While watching this video, remember that the TX-2 computer (built circa 1958) on which the software ran was built from discrete transistors (not integrated circuits -it was room-sized) and contained just 64K of 36-bit words (~272k bytes).
Robbery Fail At Motel Sanford, ME - Sanford Police are asking for the public's help identifying a man who attempted to rob a motel.
Police say just before 8:30 p.m. on Tuesday, a man entered the Super 8 Motel on Main Street, displayed a knife, and demanded money from the female desk clerk. The woman refused to cooperate with him. Police say she ducked into a back room and called 911. The suspect was caught on a surveillance camera. He was wearing a horizontal stripe, dark blue and gray hoodie. The suspect held the hoodie closed around his face during the robbery attempt and displayed a silver bladed knife.
Inside the Japanese Hotel Staffed by Robots If there’s one place on Earth you can already get a glimpse of our robot-assisted future, it’s Japan. Routinely at the forefront of robotics research, the country has brought us some of the weirdest automatons, most lifelike androids, and cutest helper-bots. Nowhere is this more evident than at Nagasaki’s Henn-na Hotel, a hotel run by robots that opened this year. Walk into reception and a mechanised dinosaur will guide you through check-in; go to your room and a luggage bot will wheel your suitcase along beside you; get ready for bed and your own robot companion will turn out the lights. Henn-na Hotel CEO Hideo Sawada sells his offering as part of a utopian vision where robots take over manual labour so humans can turn their attention to more creative pursuits. Replacing staff with robots might reduce labour costs, but their appeal to visitors needs to last beyond novelty value. Motherboard host Ben Ferguson checks into the robot hotel in the first episode of our new travel series Voyager, made possible by travel tool KAYAK (http://www.kayak.co.uk/). The robot workers he meets are courteous and communicative, but can they emulate the human warmth of their flesh-and-blood counterparts? Could robots really be our future holiday companions, or do man and machine ultimately get lost in translation?