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Alan Kay Demos GRaIL

Vincent Gable · 30.2K views · 2009-01-19 · 2:05

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Overview

Alan Kay demonstrates GRaIL, a graphical input language system from around 1968 in which hand-drawn strokes become boxes, connections and dataflow-style programs.

On Hacker News

HN points to it as proof that the 1960s already had modeless, sketch-based interfaces that remain impressive today.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2016–2025

Topics

GUI, HCI & interface historyHistory of computing
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alan kaygrailvisual programmingcomputing historyuser interface

What people said

some-mthfka · 2023-01 · Strong recommendation

Man, I love these old demos. And I haven't seen this one before. I now understand much better what Alan Kay meant when he said: I felt like sticking my hands right through the display and actually touching the information structures directly. This is the first system I have used, and practically the only one since that I would call truly intimate. [1] Thanks for this link. Well, in terms of UI, I see no problem whatsoever in building such a workflow. The way it will work is: lenses (aka editors) are cells (aka widgets). So you will be able to position things freely, anywhere. You could even connect and see actual symbols get imported and such. As for the CL side, unimporting a symbol (aka removing a connection) is possible, so I see no problem there either : ) [1] [VIDEO]

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colllectorof · 2017-11 · Recommendation

This line of thinking goes back even further. Back to 1968 when GRAIL was developed: [VIDEO] Pretty amazing stuff, even today.

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jancsika · 2025-10 · Reference

If Alan Kay doesn't respond directly to this comment, what is Hacker News even for ? :) You're not wrong about history, but that only strengthens Kay's case. E.g., our gazillion-times better physical substrate should have led an array of hotshot devs to write web apps that run circles around GraIL[1] by 2025. (Note the modeless GUI interaction.) Well, guess what? Such a thing definitely doesn't exist. And that can only point to programmers having a general lack of knowledge about their incredibly short history. (In reality my hope is some slice of devs have achieved this and I've summoned links to their projects by claiming the opposite on the internet.) Edit: just so I get the right incantation for summoning links-- I'm talking about the whole enchilada of a visual language that runs and rebuilds the user's flowchart program as the user modelessly edits it. 1: [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Vincent Gable, played through YouTube.

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