Ivan Sutherland

Ivan Sutherland was born in Hastings, Nebraska, in 1938. He received a B.S. from Carnegie-Mellon University (1959); an M.S. from California Institute of Technology (1960); and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1963). Sutherland's Ph.D. dissertation, "Sketchpad: A Man Machine Graphical Communication System," was a groundbreaking interactive computer-aided design system. From 1964-66, Sutherland was director of the Information Processing Techniques office of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), and he guided computer research across the United States, particularly in the areas of timesharing and artificial intelligence. In 1968, he joined colleague David Evans to build a center of computer graphics research at the University of Utah and to found with him the Evans and Sutherland Computer Corporation. From 1976 to 1980, Dr. Sutherland served as chairman of computer science at the California Institute of Technology; from 1980 on he was a vice president of the small consulting firm Sutherland, Sproull and Associates which Sun acquired in 1990 to form the basis of its Research Laboratory.