Ivan Sutherland

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Ivan Sutherland

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 is a member of the National Academy of Engineering as well as the National Academy of Sciences.

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 On-Line System 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.

From 1966 to 1968 he was an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at Harvard. With the help of his student Bob Sproull he created what is widely considered to be the first Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) Head Mounted Display (HMD) system in 1968. 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.

In 1968 he co-founded Evans and Sutherland with his friend and colleague David Evans. The company 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).

From 1974 to 1978 he was the Fletcher Jones Professor of Computer Science at Caltech, where he was the founding head of that school's Computer Science department. 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.

Dr. Sutherland is currently a Vice President and Fellow at Sun Microsystems and is a visiting scholar in the Computer Science Division at UC Berkeley (Fall 2005 - Spring 2007). He has two children, Juliet and Dean, and four grandchildren, Belle, Robert, William and Rose.

On May 28, 2006, Ivan Sutherland married Marly Roncken.