This paper analyses how architecture became a pioneer discipline in digital interactivity research. It describes how that pioneer research derives from a lineage of researchers whose work spans more than two decades beginning in the early fifties. Military funds enabled the creation of the first computer graphic interfaces that evolved into a "drawing machine'', the first interactive CAD, that made possible the role of architecture as a pioneering discipline in interactivity research. It is expected to demonstrate that the same architecture that nowadays uses mainly interactive digital design was one of first disciplines to research interactivity addressing a gap in the study of the link between architecture and interactivity.

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CAD,Interactivity research,Architectural design