Breakfast with Ivan Sutherland
Last Thursday I joined a number of Sun Labs interns for breakfast with Ivan Sutherland, a vice-president and fellow at Sun Labs. Ivan is widely regarded as the founder of computer graphics. Since joining Sun, he has led a team working on asynchronous circuits (roughly, computer circuits without a clock).
Ivan Sutherland at the console of the TX-2 - Sketchpad Project, MIT, 1963 Ivan started off showing us a video of his PhD project, a computer program called Sketchpad. SketchPad allowed the user to draw shapes on the screen using a light pen, to manipulate the shapes, zoom in and out, copy and resize shapes, and so on. Most notably, this was the first computer graphics program. Ever. It was written in 1963, a time when almost all computers ran batches of jobs, usually submitted as time cards. In the video he shows shapes being enlarged and having parts of them going off the screen, showing only a portion of the image. Ivan said, “That’s called clipping. Do you know why it’s called clipping? Because I decided to call it that.”
After having talked for many years about the research and the role of the researcher, Ivan wrote a paper called Technology and Courage, in which he talks about the courage that is needed to face a research problem and see it through. An interesting read for those leaning to academics and research.
In a recent blog entry, I mentioned a visit to the Computer History Museum, which happened the day after breakfast with Ivan. Ivan’s son Dean accompanied us to the museum, and provided some interesting perspective along the way, especially when he showed us the first virtual reality goggles, designed by his father more than a few years ago.
Comment by E. Roits
“That’s called clipping. Do you know why it’s called clipping? Because I decided to call it that.”
Uau, amazing !! This is a true “classic” !!
