Ivan Edward Sutherland, younger brother of Bert Sutherland, 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 may have been the world's first Virtual Reality system using head-mounted displays (HMDs)[1]. It was primitive both in terms of user interface and realism; 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 reality were simple wireframe rooms.
Sutherland earned his Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from the Carnegie Institute of Technology (known now as Carnegie-Mellon University), his Master's degree from Caltech, and his Ph.D. from MIT. 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.
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