From 1963 to 1965, after he received his PhD, he served in the U.S. Army, commissioning as an officer through the ROTC program at Carnegie Institute of Technology. As a first lieutenant, Sutherland replaced
J. C. R. Licklider as the head of the US Defense Department
Advanced Research Project Agency's
Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), when Licklider took a job at IBM in 1964. From 1965 to 1968, Sutherland was an associate professor of electrical engineering at
Harvard University. Work with student
Danny Cohen in 1967 led to the development of the
Cohen–Sutherland computer graphics line clipping algorithm. In 1968, with his students
Bob Sproull, Quintin Foster,
Danny Cohen, and others he created the first head-mounted display that rendered images for the viewer's changing pose, as sensed by
The Sword of Damocles, thus making the first
virtual reality system. A prior system,
Sensorama, used a
head-mounted display to play back static video and other sensory stimuli. The optical see-through head-mounted display used in Sutherland's VR system was a stock item used by U.S. military helicopter pilots to view video from cameras mounted on the helicopter's belly. From 1968 to 1974, Sutherland was a professor at the
University of Utah. Among his students there were
Alan Kay, inventor of the
Smalltalk language, Gordon W. Romney (computer and cybersecurity scientist), who rendered the first 3D images at U of U,
Henri Gouraud, who devised the
Gouraud shading technique,
Frank Crow, who went on to develop
antialiasing methods, Jim Clark, founder of
Silicon Graphics,
Henry Fuchs, and
Edwin Catmull, who co-founded
Pixar and was the president of
Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios. In 1968 Sutherland co-founded
Evans & Sutherland with his friend and colleague
David C. Evans. The company did pioneering work in the field of real-time hardware, accelerated
3D computer graphics, and
printer languages. Former employees of Evans & Sutherland included the future founders of
Adobe (
John Warnock) and
Silicon Graphics (
Jim Clark). From 1974 to 1978 Sutherland was the
Fletcher Jones Professor of Computer Science at
California Institute of Technology, where he was the founding head of that school's computer science department. He then founded a consulting firm, Sutherland, Sproull and Associates, which was purchased in 1990 by
Sun Microsystems to form the seed of its research division, Sun Labs. Sutherland was a fellow and vice president at
Sun Microsystems. Sutherland was a visiting scholar in the computer science division at
University of California, Berkeley (fall 2005 – spring 2008). Since 2009, Sutherland and Roncken have led the research in
Asynchronous Systems at
Portland State University.
Awards and honors •
Computer History Museum Fellow "for the Sketchpad computer-aided design system and for lifelong contributions to computer graphics and education", 2005 • R&D 100 Award, 2004 (team) •
IEEE John von Neumann Medal, 1998 • Elected a
Fellow of the
Association for Computing Machinery in 1994 •
Electronic Frontier Foundation EFF Pioneer Award, 1994 •
ACM Software System Award, 1993 • Honorary
Doctor of Philosophy from the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1986). •
Turing Award, 1988 •
Computerworld Honors Program, Leadership Award, 1987 • • Elected a member of the
National Academy of Sciences of the United States in 1978 •
Kyoto Prize 2012, in the category of advanced technology. •
National Inventors Hall of Fame Inductee, 2016. •
Washington Award, 2018 •
BBVA Fronteras del conocimiento 2019.
Quotes • "A display connected to a digital computer gives us a chance to gain familiarity with concepts not realizable in the physical world. It is a looking glass into a mathematical wonderland." • "The ultimate display would, of course, be a room within which the computer can control the existence of matter. A chair displayed in such a room would be good enough to sit in. Handcuffs displayed in such a room would be confining, and a bullet displayed in such a room would be fatal." • "It’s not an idea until you write it down." • "Without the fun, none of us would go on!"
Patents Sutherland has more than 60 patents, including: • US Patent 7,636,361 (2009) Apparatus and method for high-throughput asynchronous communication with flow control • US Patent 7,417,993 (2008) Apparatus and method for high-throughput asynchronous communication • US Patent 7,384,804 (2008) Method and apparatus for electronically aligning capacitively coupled mini-bars • US patent 3,889,107 (1975) System of polygon sorting by dissection • US patent 3,816,726 (1974) Computer Graphics Clipping System for Polygons • US patent 3,732,557 (1973) Incremental Position-Indicating System • US patent 3,684,876 (1972) Vector Computing System as for use in a Matrix Computer • US patent 3,639,736 (1972) Display Windowing by Clipping
Publications • SketchPad, 2004 from "CAD software – history of CAD CAM" by CADAZZ • Sutherland's 1963 Ph.D. Thesis from
Massachusetts Institute of Technology republished in 2003 by University of Cambridge as Technical Report Number 574,
Sketchpad, A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System. His thesis supervisor was
Claude Shannon, father of
information theory. • Duchess Chips for Process-Specific Wire Capacitance Characterization, The, by Jon Lexau, Jonathan Gainsley, Ann Coulthard and Ivan E. Sutherland,
Sun Microsystems Laboratories Report Number TR-2001-100, October 2001 • Technology And Courage by Ivan Sutherland,
Sun Microsystems Laboratories Perspectives Essay Series, Perspectives-96-1 (April 1996) • • Counterflow Pipeline Processor Architecture, by Ivan E. Sutherland, Charles E. Molnar (
Charles Molnar), and Robert F. Sproull (
Bob Sproull),
Sun Microsystems Laboratories Report Number TR-94-25, April 1994 • Oral history interview with Ivan Sutherland at
Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Sutherland describes his tenure as head of the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) from 1963 to 1965. He discusses the existing programs as established by
J. C. R. Licklider and the new initiatives started while he was there: projects in graphics and networking, the
ILLIAC IV, and the Macromodule program. ==Personal life==