[kepler-dev] Kepler UI- "Boxes and Arrows"

[Edward A Lee]

At 02:13 PM 6/18/2004 -0700, Daniel Higgins wrote:
>Hi All,
>
>     The recent Kepler thread discussing all sorts of UI issues got me 
> thinking about a lot of the issues discussed.  In particular, I liked 
> Bertram's characterization of such visual systems as "Boxes and Arrows". 
> As a result I put together a personal web page with a number of example 
> screen shots from various "Box and Arrow" systems (e.g. Stella, Kepler) 
> to try to show similarities and differences. I also added some thoughts 
> of my own. If you are interested, see
>
><http://www.nceas.uscb.edu/%7Ehiggins/BoxesAndArrows/>http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/~higgins/BoxesAndArrows/
>
>Comments are always appreciated.

Nice comparisons...

It might be interesting to note that box-and-arrow modeling and
programming environments have been around since the 1960s.
The earliest one I know of was described in the 1966 PhD thesis
of Bert Sutherland.  It was implemented on the TX-2 computer
at Lincoln labs using a surplus WW-2 radar screen and a light pen...

There are a bunch of historical references in this paper from 1989:

http://ptolemy.eecs.berkeley.edu/publications/papers/89/gabriel/gabriel.pdf

Edward


------------
Edward A. Lee, Professor
518 Cory Hall, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720
phone: 510-642-0455, fax: 510-642-2739
eal at eecs.Berkeley.EDU, http://ptolemy.eecs.berkeley.edu/~eal