Ivan Sutherland

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Ivan Sutherland on Wikipedia

 

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Ivan Sutherland Sketchpad demo 1963

May 30, 2012

This video is a TV show made about the software Ivan Sutherland developed in his 1963 thesis at MIT's Lincoln Labs, "Sketchpad, A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System", described as one of the most influential computer programs ever written. This work was seminal in Human-Computer Interaction, Graphics and Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs), Computer Aided Design (CAD), and contraint/object-oriented programming. While watching this video, remember that the TX-2 computer (built circa 1958) on which the software ran was built from discrete transistors (not integrated circuits -it was room-sized) and contained just 64K of 36-bit words (~272k bytes).

 

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Odysseys in Technology: Research and Fun, lecture by Ivan Sutherland

Jun 30, 2014

[Record Date: October 19, 2005]

I find fun and research inexorably intertwined. Research is fun! Like a team sport, the hunt for new knowledge brings purpose, comradeship, conversation, competition, and appreciation. Finding new knowledge brings the joys of novelty, beauty, simplicity, understanding, and sometimes even utility. Just as team spirit wins games, so team spirit speeds research. Team spirit lets us risk exposing our half-baked fledgling ideas so others can carry them further; team spirit lets ideas reverberate between people, growing better with each pass.

Remembering that research is fun offers strategies for both researchers and managers. One who seeks to do good research must play in a field he likes, with trusted colleagues and friends. Seek what you like to do in a place you like and with people you like and respect.

One who seeks to manage research must, like a good coach, create something more than the sum of the players. Good research management seeks the reverberation of ideas that produces results. Good research management builds pride in the environment, pride in the support and understanding researchers feel, and pride in the team. Remember that research is a human endeavor fraught with technical and emotional risks and frustrations. Reduce drudgery, stamp out frustration, encourage spirit, provide support, and recognize achievement to get both loyalty and results.

Catalog Number: 102651407

 

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Curiosity and Possibility: The Ivan Sutherland Story

May 9, 2016

Ivan Sutherland launched a new way of thinking about computers with Sketchpad technology. The genesis of a multibillion-dollar industry, Sketchpad pioneered the way for human-computer interaction.

 

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Virtual reality before it had that name

Jul 6, 2017

Collection of the Computer History Museum. This lecture was recorded on March 19, 1996.

Ivan Sutherland begins by recounting the development of the early head-mounted virtual reality device with a series of overhead projections. Begun at MIT and Harvard, and later at the University of Utah, Sutherland created what he called The Sword of Damocles with funding from sources including the CIA and Bell Helicopter, initially to be used as a display for helicopter pilots. Sutherland recounts the goals for the project, as well as the requirements to make it work, and the areas in which they had to compromise. Bob Sproul follows, discussing how he came to the project as an undergraduate student at Harvard, and others who worked on the system, including Danny Cohen, and the techniques used, and challenges faced by the team. Sutherland then weighs the success of the project vs. the failures within the technology. The video ends with a question and answer session.

Catalog number: 102639877