6/29/2023 0 Comments Geometer sketchpad lessons![]() The reason? Aesthetics, he explains in his oral history. As an undergraduate engineering student at Carnegie Tech (today’s Carnegie Mellon University), and then as a graduate student at Caltech (before he moved to MIT after one year), Sutherland continued to design and build more advanced light-seeking robots. Ivan Sutherland on the surplus Navy computer that his parents installed in the kitchen. In this clip from his oral history, Ivan describes a surplus Sperry P4 military gunsight computer that his father installed in the family kitchen: ![]() The Sutherland parents were happy to indulge their sons’ inquiries. In Berkeley’s offices, the Sutherland brothers encountered his light-seeking robot squirrel “ Squee,” now in the collection of the Computer History Museum, which also holds some of Berkeley’s papers.Īs a boy, Ivan Sutherland visited Edmund Berkeley’s office and met his robot squirrel “Squee.” Mark Richards/Computer History Museumīack at home, the Sutherland brothers worked on their own versions of light-seeking robots, using surplus parts their engineer-father helped them to source in New York City. At the time, Berkeley was establishing himself as a leading author, publisher, and consultant for the new world of digital computers. The Sutherland brothers, through a connection of their mother’s, began visiting Edmund Berkeley in New York City from their home in Scarsdale while Ivan was still in grade school. Bert, who went on to a remarkable career in computing himself, distinguished by his roles as a research manager at Xerox PARC and at Sun Laboratories, told his story in his own oral history with the Computer History Museum in 2017. The Early Influence of Edmund BerkeleyĪs recounted in his oral history interviews, Sutherland’s life in computing was profoundly shaped by interactions he and his older brother, Bert, had with two central figures in the early history of computing: Edmund Berkeley and Claude Shannon. It’s an ability to find a new viewpoint on a subject, to look at it from this novel perspective, and then to explore how this vantage might change the subject itself through fresh solutions and directions. ![]() This switching of viewpoints, the ability to look at something from a fresh and unexpected angle, and then to integrate this new perspective with those that came before, seems to me the link between Sutherland’s unusual spatial intuition with his diverse contributions in computing. One-point, two-point, and three-point perspectives are all very different, providing distinct ways to understand the represented scene. Together the vanishing points define the viewpoint of the observer. These renderings can proceed in different ways, determined by the number of vanishing points employed. Perspective drawing involves a set of techniques to represent a three-dimensional scene on the two-dimensional plane of a sheet of paper or a stretch of canvas. In his mind and at his hands, he experienced an immediacy in perceiving how things fit and worked together. From his youth, Sutherland possessed an unusually keen spatial, geometric intuition. To get at this wellspring, start with geometry. The description fits Sutherland well, although it also misses something important: There is a commonality in his many accomplishments, a shared wellspring for his many parts. There is a phrase, popular in 17th and 18th century England, that occurs to me when thinking about Ivan Sutherland: “A man of many parts.” The phrase refers to an individual who had made serious contributions to a domain, while also possessing multiple, and often diverse, talents and pursuits. The Museum is making this oral history interview public during the 60th anniversary year of Sutherland’s breakthrough in interactive computer graphics, the program Sketchpad, for which he earned his Ph.D. And the two-part video of the interview is available here and here.īob Sproull, a lifelong colleague of Sutherland and himself a major figure in computing, served as instigator, interviewer, and editor for these oral histories, and he involved me, Marc Weber, and Jim Waldo in the effort. The interview transcripts can be downloaded here and here. These interviews present a wonderful opportunity to learn more about Sutherland’s life in computing, in his own words. The Computer History Museum recently made public its two-part oral history with Sutherland. One of the most influential figures in the story of computing, he helped to open new pathways for others to explore and dramatically extend: interactive computer graphics, virtual reality, 3D computer graphics, and asynchronous systems, to name but a few. ![]() Ivan Sutherland has blazed a truly unique trail through computing over the past six decades.
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