Ivan Sutherland

Image:Ivan-sutherland.jpg Image:Ivan-sutherland2.JPG 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 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.

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.