“A display connected to a digital computer gives us a chance to gain familiarity with concepts not realizable in the physical world. It is a looking glass into a mathematical wonderland.”
-Ivan Sutherland
Born in Hartings, Nebraska in 1938, Ivan Sutherland had a mother who was a teacher and a father who had a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering. This upbringing led Ivan to enjoy learning, especially geometry.
Ivan always had an interest in computing since he was young. During high-school he became one of the first student to successfully develop a computer program, known as Simon. Ivan then went on the study at Carnegie Mellon University with a full scholarship. He earned his B.S. in Electrical Engineering and then went on to earn a M.S. also in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology. After this, Ivan went on to do a Ph.D. in Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he would go on to create the first program that could create graphics directly onto a computer screen, by use of a ‘light pen’
Sketchpad
Sketchpad had the first graphical user interface to easily allow communication between man and machine. Developed in the 60′s by Sutherland, after seeing and being impressed by Space War, the first ever computer game, Sketchpad allowed the user to create drawings using a light-pen tool. It also introduced memory to allow for storage of instances of drawings and the ability to zoom in and out of images. In short, Sketchpad can be seen as the first working CAD software system. Before Sketchpad, computers would run batches of jobs and was not interactive at all.
After finsihing college, Sutherland wento to work for the US army for the NSA as an electronic engineer. Afterwards, he was sent to work Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency were he performed on projects such as AI and timesharing.
Ivan then went to work as a teacher at Harvard University. After two years he went to the university of Utah where it became known as a school for computer graphics. In 1976, Sutherland became the head of the Computer Science department at Caltech. Here he integrated circuit design into academia. This lead to the large advances in computer chip technology and the ‘Silicon Valley’ explosion.
While Ivan Sutherland is more interested in hardware technology and Asynchronous Systems, he is still regarded highly in the field of multimedia. He has won many awards including the Computerworld Smithsonian Award in 1996 and First Zworykin Award, National Academy of Engineering in 1972
Dr. Sutherland has written over 49 Publications. He also holds many Patents including important window functions such as Display Windowing by Clipping and Computer Graphics Clipping for Polygons. His Personal Profile can be found at the SUN website.
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