paul pangaro once "programmed computer-graphics on vector displays and one of the earliest color raster-scan machines" nowadays he is senior director at sun microsystems" (The Cybernetics of HCI), developer web services.

some of his papers from the 80s: programming and animating on the same screen at the same time, 1980, creative computing.

Moreover, I want to make pictures with the computer, so why couldn't a system be made where the programs themselves were pictures (or at least two-dimensional things)? Might we not blur the distinction between programming and animating? ...

The fundamental idea of EOM was that all programs are two-dimensional scripts, whose graphical nodes themselves stood for executable programs. Two aspects were both controlled from the screen: the data paths of the program, and the graphics of the intended animation.

henry lieberman's tinker system (watch what i do) carries the idea further.

another project from the early 80s he called: beyond menus: the rats-a-stratz or the bahdeens

First, the interconnections between topics (the "do-ables" and "know-ables" of the domain) are not hierarchical; they are a heterarchy, that is, there are no inherent "higher" or "lower" entities. Hierarchies emerge out of the mesh only during action and interrogation as a result of transactions with a user.

Second, connections or relations between topics cannot not be arbitrary and ubiquitous; they must follow the rule of entailment.

instead of clicking help, "the User can ask the system "what is this function" in the same vocabulary as "do this function", the vocabulary here contained in the underlying knowledge representation."