As we celebrate the early birthday of Ivan Sutherland—the “Father of Computer Graphics”—this edition of Pioneers in Tech takes a look at his groundbreaking legacy.
Born May 16, 1938, in Hastings, Nebraska, Sutherland invented the Sketchpad for his doctoral thesis at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1988, he received the highest honor in computer science—the prestigious A.M. Turing Award—for “his pioneering and visionary contributions to computer graphics, starting with Sketchpad, and continuing after.”
The origin of modern computer graphics
In 1961, Ivan Sutherland developed Sketchpad, a pioneering graphical user interface that ran on the TX-2 at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory. Sketchpad allowed Sutherland to use a light pen to draw lines on the screen and then use computer switches to control the lines’ size and ratio. Remarkably, Sketchpad now offers commonplace features, such as a crosshair cursor, precision, and snapping to an endpoint.
Sutherland’s thesis is now part of the collections of the Computer History Museum, allowing us to see for ourselves how innovative Sketchpad was. On page 133, Sutherland included a drawing of a “Girl Traced from Photograph.” Sutherland wrote: “The photograph was read into the computer by an eight facsimile machine used in another project and shown in outline on the computer display. This outline was then traced with a wax pencil on the display face. Later, with Sketchpad on the computer, the outline was made into a Sketchpad drawing by tracing the wax line with the light pen.” (This Sketchpad documentary is a fascinating watch on YouTube.)
Sutherland is the holder of more than 60 patents. After completing his doctorate at MIT, he was commissioned as an officer in the U.S. Army and served as an electrical engineer for the National Security Agency. He then worked as a researcher for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Sutherland has been a professor at Harvard University, the University of Utah, and Caltech. He is also the founder of several pioneering computer graphics firms. The National Inventors Hall of Fame inducted him in 2016.
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