Dr. Ivan Sutherland looks back on the early days of computer graphics. When discussing the history of computer graphics, there are a few names that will always be at the forefront of discussion: Jim Blinn, Carl Machover, and Ed Catmull, to name a few. But there is only one who has earned the distinction as the father of computer graphics: Dr. Ivan Sutherland.
Sutherland has been responsible for many pioneering advances and fundamental contributions to the CG technology used for information presentation, as well as the interactive interfaces that allow people to utilize computers without the need for programming.
Back in the early 1960s while at MIT, Sutherland had devised the Sketchpad interactive graphics software - a breakthrough application that allowed users to directly manipulate figures on a computer screen through a pointing device. Sketchpad was years ahead of its time and served as a conceptual progenitor to todays graphical user interface, used in everything from computer workstations to smartphones. Sketchpad was capable of automatically generating accurate drawings from rough sketches by depicting the component elements of objects and their interrelationships. It could draw horizontal and vertical lines, and combine them into figures and shapes, which could be copied, moved, rotated, and resized while retaining their original properties. (Todays CAD system is a descendent of that program.)
I was driven by the idea that I could integrate a numerical representation of an object with a graphical representation, and that by manipulating the graphical representation, I could manipulate the underlying numerical representation, Sutherland had stated in the documentary The Story of Computer Graphics.
Sutherland earned his bachelors in electrical engineering from Carnegie Institute of Technology, which later became Carnegie Mellon University, his masters from Caltech, and his PhD from MIT in electrical engineering and computer science (EECS). Afterward, he held a number of posts, from head of the US Defense Department Advanced Research Project Agencys Information Processing Techniques Office, to associate professor at Harvard, to professor at the University of Utah. His work alongside students enabled the industry to take giants strides in CG technology with the development of a computer graphics line-clipping algorithm, a virtual reality and augmented reality head-mounted display system, Gouraud shading, anti-aliasing, and more. In fact, Sutherland designed many of these fundamental algorithms now used in CG.
By the late 60s, he and Dave Evans co-founded the Evans and Sutherland Computer Corporation with colleagues from the University of Utah, developing CG workstations such as the ESV series, and producing pioneering work in digital projection and simulation. His work has supported applications ranging from computer operating systems to video editing, animation, 3D modeling, and virtual reality. Presently, he is a visiting scientist at Portland State University.
Over the years, Sutherland has received many awards. Several months ago, he was presented with the Kyoto Prize - Japans highest private award for global achievement - in Advanced Technology for his lifetime of pioneering work in developing graphical methods of interacting with computers.
At the Kyoto Symposium Organizations presentation gala, Dr. Sutherland spoke to Karen Moltenbrey, Computer Graphics World s chief editor, about his accomplishments and the industry in general.
What prompted you to pursue this then-new field so many years ago? When I was in grade school and in early high school, our textbooks all had to be covered. My friends all had fancy covers from Yale, Princeton, or Cornell, where they aspired to go to college. My mother argued that we could not afford such fancy covers, but she had some blueprints from my fathers civil engineering work, and they were large enough to cover the books. So my books were covered with blueprints. I got bored in class and started looking at the blueprints to figure out what they meant. As a result, I could read blueprints before I got very far in high school. I liked them - they said quite a lot in just a few lines. Then when I went to college, I had to take an engineering drawing class. The purpose was to teach us to read blueprints, which I could do already, and to make beautiful drawings, which I hated because I had neither the manual dexterity nor the patience to do that. When I would erase something, it would make a mess. I thought, wouldnt it be nice if we could do something better?
When I got to MIT, I stumbled into the MIT Lincoln Laboratory and was lucky enough to use the TX-2 computer. You have to realize that was the largest computer in the world at the time - it filled a room. [The transistor-based computer had 64K 36-bit words of core memory] - less computing power than you have in your cell phone. [Yet] it had twice as much memory as the next-largest computer. It had been built as an experimental machine to see how transistors could be used in large numbers to build computer equipment. It was used online, while all the other computing activities that were going then required you to put your deck of punch cards into the computer and two hours later, or two days later, you would get a stack of printouts back.
I was allowed to use the TX-2 for hours at a time as my personal computer. So that was a stroke of luck, but I already had some notion of what engineering drawings looked like, and I thought perhaps we could do that on this computer -and that is what we did. You have to remember that the display system on the TX-2 was a point-plodding display. There was an instruction within the instruction set that allowed the computer to flash one dot at one of a billion locations on the screen; that was the total capability of the display. Raster displays had
