Ivan Sutherland
May 16, 1938 — Hastings, Nebraska
Ivan Sutherland is an American computer scientist widely regarded as the "Father of Computer Graphics" — his 1963 MIT doctoral dissertation, which produced Sketchpad, the first modern interactive computer graphics program, effectively created the field of computer graphics and established fundamental concepts underlying every graphical user interface in use today.
Sketchpad: A Revolutionary Thesis
Born on May 16, 1938, in Hastings, Nebraska, Ivan Sutherland studied electrical engineering at Carnegie Mellon and Caltech before completing his Ph.D. at MIT in 1963 under Claude Shannon. His dissertation described and demonstrated Sketchpad — a program that allowed a user to draw directly on a computer screen using a light pen, manipulate geometric shapes, zoom in and out, and save and copy drawings. This was revolutionary: computers in 1963 were understood primarily as calculating machines that processed batch jobs; Sketchpad established that a computer could be an interactive visual tool, and that a person and a machine could work together in real time. Every subsequent development in computer graphics, and ultimately in graphical user interfaces from the Macintosh to every modern operating system, has roots in Sketchpad.
ARPA, Harvard, and the First VR Headset
After MIT, Sutherland headed the Information Processing Techniques Office at ARPA (the agency that created the internet's predecessor) from 1964 to 1966, shepherding funding for the nascent field of computer science. He then joined Harvard's faculty. In 1968, working with his student Bob Sproull at the University of Utah, he built the first head-mounted virtual reality display — a device nicknamed "The Sword of Damocles" because it was so heavy it had to be suspended from the ceiling. The user wore the device and saw a crude three-dimensional wireframe environment that changed perspective as they moved their head: the first virtual reality experience. This predates the coining of the term "virtual reality" by more than two decades.
Did You Know?
Alan Kay — who went on to design the Dynabook concept that anticipated the laptop computer — has said that seeing Sutherland's Sketchpad demonstration was one of two experiences that fundamentally changed how he thought about computing. The other was visiting Xerox PARC. Kay described Sketchpad as "the first example of a graphical user interface" and said it convinced him that computers could be personal, visual, and interactive tools rather than just calculating machines. The ripple effects of Sutherland's 1963 dissertation are visible in whatever screen you are reading this on.
Turing Award and Legacy
Ivan Sutherland received the Turing Award — computing's highest honor — in 1988, for his foundational and continuing contributions to computer graphics. He co-founded Evans & Sutherland with his University of Utah colleague David Evans; the company produced early flight simulators and 3D graphics systems that became standard tools in the aerospace industry. He later joined Sun Microsystems and then Oracle. He has been a fellow and research scientist at various universities and institutions throughout his career. His work from 1963 onward effectively created the visual computing world — the applications, interfaces, and immersive technologies — that now constitutes most of what people do with computers.