Ivan E. Sutherland

Ivan Sutherland, demonstrating the Sketchpad Project, MIT, 1963

Among the highlights of his career are the following. In 1963, when he was 25 years old, he broke through the batch-driven computer environment with an interactive way to produce engineering drawings directly on the CRT. This was his Ph.D. thesis, entitled "Sketchpad: A Man-machine Graphical Communications System". This project grew out of the MIT Lincoln Laboratory projects, which was creating new computer hardware using transistors. From the people who participated in this project, Digital Equipment Company was formed, leading to the PDP-1 and PDP-6 computers.

Sketchpad itself is noteworthy for pioneering many of the concepts central to computer graphics today, such as zooming, memory structures for storing objects, and the ability to make perfect corners, joints, and lines. Sketchpad was, in fact, the first GUI.

After his thesis, Ivan left MIT for the NSA, Harvard, the University of Utah, and the California Institute of Technology (CIT). Today his professional residence is Sun Microsystems Laboratories. Along with pioneering the computer graphics field at the University of Utah with his friend and colleague, Dave Evans, Ivan worked for acceptance of integrated circuit design during his stay as department head of Computer Science at CIT. This led to the chip design expansion on which Silicon Valley is based. Ivan is also credited for pioneering work with head-mounted displays, and with Bob Sproull he turned work on the "Remote Reality" vision systems of the Bell Helicopter project into Virtual Reality by simulating the camera's images with a computer.

University of Utah students measure Ivan's car to produce the model on the right.

Currently, Ivan is at Sun Laboratories, whose core is comprised of people from the Sutherland, Sproull, and Associates consulting firm, started in 1980. Here, people are free to explore ideas without the constraint of producing a commercial product. As Ivan said, "Every company has a lot more ideas than can ever come to fruition as products. At Sun Laboratories, we have the luxury to sort out the ideas, see which ones might fly, and fail at others. We can explore the possible opportunities of an idea at low cost, without the overhead and broad involvement of the whole company." (from Sun Microsystems Feature Article)

References and Links

Much of the information for this biography comes from: