He then founded a consulting firm, Sutherland, Sproull and Associates, which was purchased by Sun Microsystems to form the seed of its research division, Sun Labs. Former employees of Evans and Sutherland included the future founders of Adobe ( John Warnock) and Silicon Graphics (Jim Clark).įrom 1974 to 1978 he was the Fletcher Jones Professor of Computer science at California Institute of Technology, where he was the founding head of that school's Computer Science department. The company has done pioneering work in the field of real-time hardware, accelerated 3D computer graphics, and printer languages. In 1968 he co-founded Evans and Sutherland with his friend and colleague David C. Among his students there were Alan Kay, inventor of the Smalltalk language, Henri Gouraud, who devised the Gouraud shading technique, Frank Crow, who went on to develop antialiasing methods, and Edwin Catmull, computer graphics scientist, co-founder of Pixar and now President of Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios. In 1968, with the help of his student Bob Sproull, he created the first virtual reality and augmented reality head-mounted display system, named The Sword of Damocles.įrom 1968 to 1974, Sutherland was a professor at the University of Utah. Work with student Danny Cohen in 1967 led to the development of the Cohen–Sutherland computer graphics line clipping algorithm. Licklider as the head of the US Defense Department Advanced Research Project Agency's Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), when Licklider returned to MIT in 1964.įrom 1965 to 1968, Sutherland was an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at Harvard University. Sketchpad, in turn, was influenced by the conceptual Memex as envisioned by Vannevar Bush in his influential paper " As We May Think". Sketchpad ran on the Lincoln TX-2 computer and influenced Douglas Engelbart's oN-Line System. Sketchpad also had the first window-drawing program and clipping algorithm, which allowed zooming. Figures could be copied, moved, rotated, or resized, retaining their basic properties. It could draw both horizontal and vertical lines and combine them into figures and shapes. Sketchpad could accept constraints and specified relationships among segments and arcs, including the diameter of arcs. Sketchpad was an innovative program that influenced alternative forms of interaction with computers. Among others on his thesis committee were Marvin Minsky and Steven Coons. Professor Claude Shannon signed on to supervise Sutherland’s computer drawing Thesis. He invented Sketchpad in 1962 while at MIT. 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.
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