When one sits down in front of a computer and looks at the monitor to see an array of shapes and pictures that are able to be manipulated and when clicked on bring you to a whole other world of possibilities, there is on man more than any other, to whom the the credit should be delivered.Ý His name is Dr. Ivan E. Sutherland.Ý His work and innovations are the predominant ancestors to the graphical user interface we are familiar with today.
--Ivan Sutherland
Education
B.S. EE Carneige Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University), 1959;M.S. EE California Institute of Technology, 1960;
Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1963;
Professional Experience
Lead the Information Processing Techniques group at ARPA, 1964;Associate Professor, Harvard, 1966;
Cofounder, Evans & Sutherland, 1968;
Professor, University of Utah, 1970
Head of the Department of Computer Science, California Institute of Technology from 1976;
V.P. and Fellow, Sun Microsystems, Inc., present
Ivan E. Sutherland was born in Hastings, Nebraska in 1938.
Ivan's first experience with a computer was with SIMON, a relay-based mechanical computer that was lent to the Sutherland household by Edmund Berkeley. It could add up to 15. Ivan reports his first big computer program was to make SIMON divide. To make division possible, he added a conditional stop to SIMON's instruction set. Ivan's division algorithm was the longest program ever written for SIMON -- a paper tape about eight feet long. In the 1950s, computers were rare. Ivan learned to program and was one of a very few high school students who had written a computer program. This was the beginning of a distinguished career in computers, graphics, and integrated circuit design.
He first attended Carnegie-Mellon University were he received his bachelor of sciences in 1959.Ý He then proceeded to go for his masters degree at the California Institute of Technology which he received in 1960 and went on to MIT to earn his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in1963.
His Ph.D. thesis, "Sketchpad: A Man-machine Graphical Communications System," was the first ever interactive computer graphics. The Sketchpad system ran on a TX2, which was a giant machine by the standards of the day, in part because it had 320 kilobytes of fast memory, about twice the capacity of the biggest commercial machines. It had magnetic tape storage, an on-line typewriter, the first Xerox printer, paper tape for program input, and most important, a nine inch CRT. The display, a lightpen, and a bank of switches formed the interface. Sketchpad pioneered the concepts of graphical computing, including memory structures to store objects, rubber-banding of lines, the ability to zoom in and out on the display, and the ability to make perfect lines, corners, and joints. This was the first GUI (Graphical User Interface) long before the term was coined.
Fresh out of graduate school, and inducted into the Army, First Lieutenant Ivan E. Sutherland was assigned to NSA as an Electrical Engineer. In 1964, Ivan was transferred to the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA, later DARPA), and given responsibility for the newly-established Information Processing Techniques office. At age 26, Lt. Sutherland was given a secretary and $15 million a year, and was told to "go sponsor computer research." For the next two years, Ivan commissioned and managed a variety of contractors in research projects that were building modern computer science.
Ivan joined the faculty at Harvard in 1966. At Harvard in 1967, he worked with Bob Sproull, an undergraduate, on computer displays. Together they created a mounted head display which an user could use to immerse himself in a 3 Dimensional environment. This was the pioneering work in the area of virtual reality.
in 1968, he alongwith Evans founded Evans & Sutherland which today ships $150 million of product per year and is the premier developer and manufacturer of computer imaging systems for visualization, and is the leading supplier of visual simulation equipment used for pilot training. While co-founding Evans and Sutherland in Salt Lake City in 1968, Ivan was also a one-third time tenured professor at the University of Utah. Led by Professor Evans and Professor Sutherland, the Computer Science Department at the University of Utah became the premier center for the development of computer graphics.
Having contributed to the field of graphics, in 1975 Ivan turned from computer graphics to other work.
As head of the Department of Computer Science at California Institute of Technology from 1976 - 1980, Dr. Sutherland helped Professor Carver Mead introduce integrated circuit design to academia. Until then, the design of integrated circuits was the province of a few industrial firms; academics found it too mundane or too difficult to study. Ivan and Carver founded a Computer Science Department at Caltech focused on integrated circuit design. By learning to teach courses inintegrated circuit design, they paved the way for colleges to produce a new generation of IC engineers, propelling the explosion in chip design that is the basis for Silicon Valley.
In 1980, Ivan and Bob Sproull started a consulting firm -- Sutherland, Sproull & Associates. Two years later they were joined by Ivan's brother Bert. In 1990, Sun bought the company for its patent base and its key people. This acquisition became the nucleus of Sun Microsystems Laboratories. Since its inception, Sun Laboratories has been a hotbed of ideas. It is a place where the best and brightest in the computer world can find others to help work out their ideas.
Presently Ivan is a fellow and V.P. at Sun Microsystems Inc.
Ivan is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards, prominent amongst which are -
Smithsonian Computer World Award, 1996AM Turing Award, Association for Computing Machinery, 1988
First Zworykin Award, National Academy of Engineering, 1972
Member, National Academy of Sciences, since 1978
Member, National Academy of Engineering, since 1973
Member, Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE)
Fellow, Association for Computing Machinery
Not inclined to dwell on the past, Ivan seems eager to get on with the future. Once he has cracked a new problem -- opened a new door -- he moves on to the next one, leaving it to others to develop the applications of his pioneering work. From his early work with the 3-D head-mounted display, to creating the algorithms for displaying computer graphics, once Ivan has solved the core question, he is off to tackle the next problem. This attitude continues today at Sun Microsystems Laboratories, where Ivan is one of a small group of technologists, engineers, and scientists who explore new technologies, transitioning them to Sun's business units when they prove commercially viable.