Visual Programming

Introduction

A little history of VP

The very first Visual programming language was implemented by William Sutherland (now the director of research at Sun) way back in 1965. He used a pen based graphics editor to interact with and draw data flow diagrams. These diagrams could be immediatly run and debugged.

Interestingly, at this time, MIT's Lincoln lab, where this program was being run, was the only computer in the world at that time that "required" graphics hardware. (The TX-2).

However, from this point till about the mid 1980's, the Visual Programming realm was pretty much stagnant. The major factor that lead to the sudden success and boom of visual programming was the advancement and the wide spread use of graphics hardware.


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