Ivan Sutherland
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Ivan Sutherland, working at MIT (1963) |
Ivan Edward Sutherland (born
1938 in
Hastings, Nebraska) is a computer programmer and Internet pioneer.
Sutherland earned his
Bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the
Carnegie Institute of Technology (now
Carnegie Mellon University), his
Master's degree from
Caltech, and his Ph.D. from
MIT in
EECS in 1963.
He was the inventor of
Sketchpad, an innovative program that influenced alternative forms of interaction with computers.
Sketchpad ran on the
Lincoln TX-2 computer and influenced
Douglas Engelbart's as well as the development of the
graphical user interface.
Sketchpad, in turn, was influenced by the conceptual
Memex as envisioned by
Vannevar Bush in his famous paper "
As We May Think". For his invention of Sketchpad and related work, Sutherland received the
Turing Award in
1988.
In 1968, Sutherland, with the help of his student
Bob Sproull, created what is widely considered to be the first
Virtual Reality (VR) and
Augmented Reality (AR) Head Mounted Display (HMD) system. It was primitive both in terms of
user interface and
realism, and the
HMD to be worn by the user was so heavy it had to be suspended from the ceiling, and the
graphics comprising the
virtual environment were simple
wireframe rooms. The formidable appearance of the device inspired its name,
The Sword of Damocles.
With his friend and colleague
David Evans, he established
Evans and Sutherland, a company that has done pioneering work in the field of real-time hardware, accelerated
3D computer graphics, and
printer languages.
Former employees of Evans and Sutherland included the future founders of
Adobe (
John Warnock) and
Silicon Graphics (
Jim Clark).
He currently works for
Sun Microsystems and has two children, Juliet and Dean, and four grandchildren, Belle, Robert, William and Rose. On May 28, 2006, Ivan Sutherland married Marly Roncken.
*
SketchPad*
Ivan Sutherland, Sun Fellow and V.P*Sutherland's Ph.D. Thesis,
Sketchpad, A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System. His thesis supervisor was
Claude Shannon, father of
information theory.
*
An Evening with Ivan Sutherland at the Computer History Museum on 19-Oct-2005: »Research and Fun« (online video and partial transcript)
