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Spatial
Dataland - 1977 October 6, 2003 /Mike Liebhold Exchanges with colleagues last week about zoomable interfaces reminded me that Nicholas Negroponte and his colleagues [William Donelson ]*** at the MIT Architecture Machine group actually developed a user interface called Dataland at MIT before 1977 and built beautiful running prototypes of systems many are still struggling to emmulate to this day: orbital views and maps with a Zooming User Interface to embedded objects at a personal level, based on what Nicholas and Richard Bolt [William Donelson ]*** called SDMS – Spatial Data Management System * * * Updated May 3, 2004 : Here's a long overdue amendment to the history of developement of the MIT SDMS The Spatial Data Management System, that I cited above as developed by Richard Bolt MIT ArchMach graduate, William Donelson e-mailed to correct the record, referring " to my MIT work called "The Spatial Data Management System", which formed my Master's Thesis of 1978. Dr Bolt later wrote a report on this work for our sponsors. You can find out more about my 1975-1978 ACM-published work at the ACM website The design work on the SDMS and SDMS II systems which were completed in the 1975-1980 time period. ...The improved SDMS II was presented in 1978 to Siggraph, with an updated video the following year. I, myself, did at least 85% of the design, and almost all the implementation, with the help of several other students on some of the "utilities" such as the Calculator (Chris Schandt, now a professor at the Media Lab MIT) and the Phone Book system (by my friend Joe Rice), etc. " William Donelson is now the proprietor of the very high quality virtual tour site: armchair-travel.com * * * Rod Perkins, one of the inventors of the Lisa user interface recalls Dataland as a critical influence on Bill Atkinson's designs for the Lisa (and later Macintosh) computers in this article [pdf] that Rod wrote called "Inventing the User Interface" with Frank Luddolph, and Dan Smith Keller: "Son of DataLand" "In a clandestine effort, some of us decided to investigate the problem on our own time...Bill Atkinson recalled a trip to the M.I.T. 'ArchMac' he had made earlier, in which he saw a futuristic data navigation system called "DataLand" [Negroponte 79]. In this system, a person sits in a chair with two hand controls and faces a large screen. The controls allow you to "fly" over some data space projected on a large screen in front of you, in this case the Boston area, and then to zoom in to very fine levels of detail, or zoom out to see a huge geographical area. Bill adapted this idea to the filing problem by creating an enormous virtual desktop, perhaps a mile square, and then providing methods for very quickly moving around and zooming in or out . The idea was that icons would be used for documents, and that they would be organized spatially, with related documents placed near each other ..." |
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