Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology

Sutherland, Ivan Edward 463Simchi, David, Philip Kaminsky, and Edith Simchi-Levi. Designingand Managing the Supply Chain. 2nd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002.Worthen, Ben. “ABC: An Introduction to Supply Chain Management.”CIO. Available online. URL: http://www.cio.com/article/40940. Accessed November 18, 2007.Sutherland, Ivan Edward(1938– )AmericanComputer ScientistToday it is hard to think about computers without interactivegraphics displays. Whether one is flying a simulated747 jet, retouching a photo, or just moving files from onefolder to another, everything is shown on the screen ingraphical form. For the first two decades of the computer’shistory, however, computers lived in a text-only world,except for a few experimental military systems. Duringthe 1960s and 1970s Ivan Sutherland would almost single-handedlycreate the framework for modern computergraphics while designing Sketchpad, the first computerdrawing program.Sutherland was born on May 16, 1938, in Hastings,Nebraska, but the family later moved to Scarsdale, NewYork. His father was a civil engineer, and as a young boySutherland was fascinated by the drawing and surveyinginstruments his father used. When he was about 12,Sutherland and his brother Bert got a job working fora pioneer computer scientist named Edmund Berkeley.Berkeley gave Sutherland the opportunity to play with“Simon,” a suitcase-sized electromechanical computer thatcould add numbers as long as the total did not exceed 30.Simon eventually rewired the machine so it could dividenumbers as well.Sutherland first attended Carnegie Mellon University,where he received a B.S. in electrical engineering in 1959.The following year he earned an M.A. from the CaliforniaInstitute of Technology (Cal Tech). He then went to MIT todo his doctoral work under Claude Shannon at the LincolnLaboratory (see Shannon, Claude).At MIT Sutherland was able to work with the TX-2, anadvanced (and very large) transistorized computer that wasa harbinger of the minicomputers that would become prevalentlater in the decade. Unlike the older mainframes, theTX-2 had a graphics display and could accept input from alight pen as well as switches that could serve something likethe functions that mouse buttons do today. The machinealso had 70,000 36-bit words of memory, an amount thatwould not be achieved by personal computers until the1980s. Having this much memory made it possible to storethe pixel information for detailed graphics objects.Having access to this interactive machine gave Sutherlandthe idea for his doctoral dissertation (submitted in1963). He developed a program called Sketchpad, whichrequired that he develop algorithms for drawing realisticobjects by plotting pixels and polygons as well as scalingobjects in relation to the viewer’s position. Sutherland’sSketchpad could even automatically “snap” lines into placeas the user drew on the screen with the light pen. Besidesdrawing, Sketchpad demonstrated the beginnings of the“graphical user interface” that would be further developedby researchers at Xerox PARC in the 1970s and would reachthe consumer in the 1980s.After demonstrating Sktechpad in 1963 and receivinghis Ph.D. from MIT, Sutherland took on a quite differenttask. He became the director of the Information ProcessingTechniques Office (IPTO) of the Defense Department’sAdvanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA)—see Licklider,J. C. R. While continuing his research on graphicsSutherland thus also oversaw the work on computer timesharingand the networking research that would eventuallylead to the ARPANet and the Internet.In 1968 Sutherland and David Evans went to the Universityof Utah, where they established an InformationProcessing Technology Office (IPTO)–funded computergraphics research program. There, Sutherland’s groupbrought computer graphics to a new level of realism. Forexample, they developed the ability to place objects in frontof other objects, which required intensive calculations todetermine what was obscured. They also developed an ideasuggested by Evans called incremental computing. Instead ofdrawing each pixel in isolation, they used information frompreviously drawn pixels to calculate new ones, considerablyspeeding up the rendering of graphics. The results began toapproach the realism of a photograph. (The two researchersalso founded a commercial enterprise, Evans and Sutherland,to exploit their graphics ideas. It became one of theleaders in the field.)In 1976 Sutherland left the University of Utah to serveas the chairman of the computer science department at CalTech. Working with a colleague, Carver Mead, Sutherlanddeveloped a systematic concept and curriculum for integratedcircuit design, which became the main specialty ofthe department. He would later point out that it was theimportant role that geometry played in laying out componentsand wires that had intrigued him the most.Sutherland left Caltech in 1980 and started a consultingand venture capital firm with Bob Sproull, whom he hadmet years earlier at Harvard. In 1990 Sun Microsystemsbought the company for its technical expertise, making itthe core of Sun Labs, where Sutherland continues to workas a Sun Microsystems Fellow and vice president. Sutherlandreceived the prestigious ACM Turing Award in 1988.Further Reading“An Evening with Ivan Sutherland: Research and Fun” [partialtranscript and online video]. Computer History Museum,October 19, 2005. Available online. URL: http://www.mprove.de/script/05/sutherland/index.html. Accessed November 18,2007.Frenkel, Karen A. “Ivan E. Sutherland, 1988 A. M. Turing AwardRecipient” [Interview]. Communications of the ACM 32 (June1989): 711.Sutherland, Ivan E. “Sketchpad—A Man-Machine Graphical CommunicationSystem.” University of Cambridge ComputerLaboratory. Technical Report No. 574 [with new preface],September 2003. Available online. URL: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/TechReports/UCAM-CL-TR-574.pdf. Accessed November18, 2007.