CMU graduate called father of computer graphics

A slide shown at last week's dedication of CMU's Gates computer science school and Hillman future technology building caught TechMan's eye.

The slide said that eight past or present members of CMU's faculty and two alumni have received the A.M. Turing Award, often called the Nobel Prize of computer science.

The award's namesake, the late Alan M. Turing, was in the news recently when British Prime Minister Gordon Brown formally apologized on behalf of his country for Mr. Turing's treatment.

Mr. Turing, a computer pioneer who helped win WWII with his work on cracking the Nazis' Enigma code, was sentenced to chemical castration in 1952 after being convicted of a charge of gross indecency for being an admitted homosexual. Mr. Turing committed suicide two years later. I'd say it's a bit late for an apology.

Looking at the CMU list, TechMan noted the name of Ivan Sutherland, who received his undergraduate degree from CMU and undoubtedly qualifies for TechMan's infrequent series, "Giants of Technology You've Probably Never Heard Of."

Mr. Sutherland often is called the father of computer graphics.

Back in the early '60s, before personal computers, the only way you could communicate with computers was with numbers or arcane commands on punch cards.

Mr. Sutherland believed there were other ways, so he devised a computer program called SketchPad. It was the first crude computer drawing program and an important precursor of the graphical user interface that debuted to the world in the Apple Macintosh.

But Mr. Sutherland's interest in how we communicate with computers didn't stop there. He spent some time running ARPA, the military agency that is widely credited with devising the Internet. There he explored how we could communicate with computers using other computers.

At Harvard University in 1968, he created the first virtual reality head-mounted display system. The head-mounted display, worn by the user, was so heavy it had to be suspended from the ceiling. Because of its formidable appearance, it was named The Sword of Damocles.

From 1968 to 1974, Mr. Sutherland was a professor at the University of Utah, where he shepherded a number of students who would become influential in the field of computers.

In 1968, he and colleague David Evans co-founded Evans and Sutherland, a company that did pioneering work in accelerated three-dimensional computer graphics and printer languages.

At Evans and Sutherland, he employed John Warnock, future founder of Adobe Inc., and Jim Clark, who founded Silicon Graphics and later a little company called Netscape.

In the 1970s, Mr. Sutherland taught at the California Institute of Technology where he founded the computer science department. He formed another company that was bought by Sun Microsystems, where he is now.

Always on the cutting edge, he now is working on asynchronous systems -- systems that do not have a central clock.

A few readers took TechMan's suggestion and sent me their favorite Web sites. John recommended aldaily.com -- news and links about the arts and letters.

Mike recommended khanacademy.org. A site I had never heard of, it is a vast catalogue of short, educational YouTube videos. Mike said he and his kids are on this site all the time.

And another Mike plugged TED.com, videos of short lectures by all kinds of distinguished thinkers. TechMan had written a column about TED a while ago, but it is well worth another mention.

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