The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal
by M. Mitchell Waldrop · 14 Apr 2001
about millions of dollars and whole teams of people. It was as though these folks had encountered this alien creature: friendly, but strange." Another participant, Ivan Sutherland, remembers his first meeting in 1964: "These people met, period. The group had no charter, no responsibilities, no budget, no purpose-but it was a
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and very junior candidate whose credentials were about the most awkward and inconven- ient conceivable in the Pentagon. He was a skinny, intense fellow named Ivan Sutherland. He was twenty-six years old. And at the time he was a first lieu- tenant in the army. It wasn't that he hadn
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, "at the Spring Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, during the discussion period of a session on man-computer communication chaired by Douglas En- gelbart, Ivan Sutherland mentioned his Sketchpad program and, at the end of the session, showed to a few lingering enthusiasts the most dramatic on-line graphical compositions that
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time- sharing systems at Berkeley, SDC, and Project MAC. Alas, he later recalled, he didn't have much time to use it himself-"but when Ivan Sutherland succeeded me, he had a steady stream of military people coming to play with that console, including generals and admirals. He found that he had
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BBN. And it was Taylor who was brought over to ARPA in early 1965- on Lick's enthusiastic recommendation-to serve as a deputy to Ivan Sutherland. Taylor had a grand time at ARPA. His young boss was smart, honest, forthright, and exceedingly well informed-a pleasure to work with. Moreover, Lick
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he didn't command the kind of automatic re- spect from the ARPA community that Sutherland had commanded. In their THE INTERGALACTIC NETWORK 263 eyes, Ivan Sutherland had been a technological genius-just the kind of man the agency needed in that position. But Taylor was, well, a psychologist. With no Ph
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.D. "Can you imagine going from J. C. R. Licklider to Ivan Sutherland to . . . Bob Taylor?" asks one PI, remembering his reaction at the time. No one said anything overt, of course, since Taylor did control the money
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with the ex- pertise, the credibility, and the clout to design the network and push it through. Indeed, he already knew exactly who he wanted: Ivan Sutherland's former Lin- coln Lab officemate, Lawrence G. Roberts. Sutherland himself rated Larry Roberts as one of the smartest people he'd ever met. And
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, well, going to work for Bob Taylor. Roberts had more reason than most to consider Taylor an "interim" director of IPTO. Earlier that year, when Ivan Sutherland had been planning his depar- ture from that post, he had first asked Roberts to take over the office. "Ivan had concluded that the only
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was widely shared by the research community, where news of Roberts's appointment was greeted with sighs of relief. "Larry was the obvious successor to Ivan Sutherland," says one ARPA principal investigator. "So the fact that Larry was called chief scientist made things OK." A similar view was taking hold in Washington
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and started looking for a way to leave. Happily, the perfect opportunity quickly arrived in the form of a job offer from Dave Evans and Ivan Sutherland at the University of Utah. "In nineteen sixty-eight Dave had recruited Ivan from Harvard to come help him with the graphics research at Utah
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"the freedom to make mistakes." An even larger share of the credit goes to the successive directors of IPTO it- self: J. C. R. Licklider, Ivan Sutherland, Bob Taylor, and Larry Roberts. Although the ARPA management style granted them enormous, almost unfettered author- ity to dictate the course of research, they all
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to me: 'Take this and read it.' Every new- comer got one. The title was Sketchpad: A man-machine graphical communication system." The author was Ivan Sutherland; this was his 1963 Ph.D. dissertation. And the message, according to Kay, was very clear: Dave Evans took this Center for Excellence stuff seriously
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dimension or another, crummy." There were the IMLACs, for example, which worked like an oscilloscope or, for that matter, like the TX-2 display that Ivan Sutherland had used for Sketch- pad. That is, they would project a single bright spot on a dark screen and then electronically move that spot around
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screen with a set of virtual brushes, in much the same way that Macintosh users would later do with MacPaint. Draw, similar in spirit to Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad, allowed users to build up drawings from mathematically defined lines and curves; it would be the direct ancestor of MacDraw. And Chuck Thacker
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- nology's potential was obviously breathtaking. According to an ARPA-funded panel convened in 1976 by the RAND Corporation (and headed by none other than Ivan Sutherland), "the integrated circuit revolution [had] only run half its course" by then. 4 In the mid-1970s, the state of the art allowed for maybe
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Ritchie, OH 239; Lawrence G. Roberts, OH 159; Douglas T. Ross, OH 65, OH 178;Jack P. Ruina, OH 163;Jules I. Schwartz, OH 161; Ivan Sutherland, OH 171; Robert A. Tay- lor, OH 154; Ken Thompson, OH 239;Joseph F. Traub, OH 70, OH 89, OH 94; Keith W. Uncapher, OH
Dealers of Lightning
by Michael A. Hiltzik · 27 Apr 2000 · 559pp · 157,112 words
contraptions down to a level that even midsized and small universities could afford. Lick’s successor seemed the perfect man to manage this expanding program. Ivan Sutherland was a brilliant MIT graduate who happened to be serving with the Army as a first lieutenant. Only twenty-six, he had already amassed an
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to a first lieutenant with a Pentagon staff appointment was about to set Bob Taylor on the path to his, and the computer’s, destiny. Ivan Sutherland spent scarcely eighteen months at IPTO. Late in 1965 Harvard offered him a tenured position. He was officially gone by June 1966 but unofficially much
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.” What Clark found even more troubling was that subdividing the main processor, as time-sharing did, rendered impossible the sort of display-based research that Ivan Sutherland had achieved so spectacularly on the TX-2. No user of a time-shared computer could ever monopolize the processor long enough to drive a
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excellent contacts within the computing fraternity and his apparent authority to disburse millions of dollars with a minimum of fuss. (Formally speaking, Taylor was still Ivan Sutherland’s deputy at the time.) Taylor saw Pake as a pragmatic administrator capable of cutting through red tape to assist a program and a researcher
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to Kay and said, “Take this and read it.” The title read, “Sketchpad: A Man-Machine Graphical Communications System.” The 1963 MIT doctoral thesis of Ivan Sutherland, Taylor’s predecessor at IPTO, the paper described a program that had become the cornerstone of the young science of interactive computer graphics. Sketchpad worked
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, he would call it “Smalltalk.” While Kay was taking these first mind-blowing excursions into Ideaspace, the caliber of graphics research at Utah was exploding. Ivan Sutherland had joined the faculty to work with his friend Dave Evans (they would eventually form a partnership to manufacture interactive military simulators). Kay’s fellow
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way to manage research was to select the best people in a given field and set them loose. Scientists with the lofty skills ARPA demanded, Ivan Sutherland said, “are people who have ideas you can either back or not, but they are quite difficult to influence. You can 145 maybe convince them
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directly into printed boards. But scores more were right behind. There were “Draw” by Patrick Beaudelaire and “Markup” by William Newman, which picked up where Ivan Sutherland’s “Sketchpad” left off by giving users the power to place freehand drawings directly onto the bitmapped screen. (Of course, where Sutherland’s program worked
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include work toward a doctorate. “A doctoral thesis is anything you can get three faculty members to sign,” he would say in their defense (quoting Ivan Sutherland, who had been a signer of his). Or: “Point of view is worth eighty IQ points.” He did not care if his recruits had doctorates
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breadth of interests that encompassed subjects as diverse as walnut farming and particle physics. At the time of his first visit to PARC, he and Ivan Sutherland were deeply engaged in studying what happened to electronic systems at the edges of the physical scale—in other words, how minuscule a transistor could
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“medium-scale integration.” Mead had pioneered research into the next step—LSI, or “large- scale integration”—and he was still thinking ahead. In partnership with Ivan Sutherland, he began exploring the difficulties and possibilities presented by the coming quantum leap in miniaturization, which would bring them to VLSI, or “very large-scale
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in computer graphics came from well within PARC’s universe: He had received his doctorate at the University of Utah, where his thesis advisor was Ivan Sutherland and his research funding had come from ARPA. At Utah and later at Stanford, Clark was driven by the impulse to push the technology of
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., p. 176. The embarrassing results: Ibid., p. 176. Chapter 21: The Silicon Revolution Create some havoc: Perry & Wallich, p. 73. This worked fine: Mead, Carver, & Ivan Sutherland, “Microelectronics and Computer Science,” in Scientific American, Sept. 1977.to perform individual steps: Ibid. Their collaboration: The Mead-Conway text was published in 1979by Addison
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University of Hawaii, 78 University of Utah, 73 ARPA and, 90 ARPANET and, 48graphics and, 90, 92–93, 231, 311 Kay and, 81, 90–93 Ivan Sutherland and, 92–93, 311 Taylor and, 43, 48 Ural II, 195–96 Urbach, John C., 58, 123, 134, 215, 386, 403 User-friendly machine, Star
Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Writing Science)
by Thierry Bardini · 1 Dec 2000
computing at NASA.16 In 1964, Licklider resigned from ARPA in order to return to MIT and was replaced as director of the IPTO by Ivan Sutherland, at that time a 26- year-old army lieutenant at Fort Meade, Maryland. Taylor served as Suther- land's associate director until 1965, when Sutherland
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midyear 1964 to mid- year 1965 at a level of about eighty-five thousand dollars. Taylor's support became even more important when he became Ivan Sutherland's second in 24 Introduction command at the IPTO in July 1964, and then when he took the direction of the IPTO, in June 1966
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, Edward Fredkin, and younger members such as Ivan Suther- land. MIT also had operated an early time-sharing system since Decem- ber 1958,30 and Ivan Sutherland developed Sketchpad, the first graphics soft- ware, on the TX-2 computer. The research on artificial intelligence certainly gave strength to the East Coast subnetwork
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). However, he attributed the most important rating (10) to the func- tional features of the system that he called" Sketchpad" features. These were part of Ivan Sutherland's system design at the MIT Lincoln Lab on the TX-2 computer for his doctoral thesis (Sutherland 1963).2 Sketchpad was the most important
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Invention of the Mouse 85 "Other Related Thoughts and Work" in his 1962 report, Engelbart wrote: "we understand that another graduate student there [at MIT], Ivan Sutherland, is currently using the display-computer facility on the TX-2 computer at Lincoln Lab to develop cooperative techniques for engineering design problems." Producing and
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system, a display system developed at MIT Electronic Systems Laboratory as part of the CAD project headed by Ross. It was also used later on Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad on the TX-2 computer. As it appeared in Sutherland's 1963 design, the Sketchpad's stylus was the most recent descendant of
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system should be based on a tablet, rather than a light pen. Keith Uncapher confirmed that Sutherland's influence was obvious on the GRAIL group: Ivan Sutherland's thesIs was a revelatIon of the kind of things that could be done wIth graphics. We naturally thought about the output and the input
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his "hacks" on the TX-o at MIT when he was thirteen years old (Levy 1984a, 30- 3 I). This "generational thing" was crucial. Like Ivan Sutherland, Peter Deutsch, Butler Lampson (and also Alan Kay and Larry Tesler) were all Baby Boomers, the first generation to grow up with computers, the first
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, 25 I). Edwin L. Hutchins, James D. Hollan, and Donald A. Norman (1986,91) consider that the "first major landmark" in direct manipulation interfaces was Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad. 2 As we have seen, the subsequent development of direct manipulation inter- faces at Xerox PARC and Apple occurred via the search for
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Horvath (1995). 19. This IS Pamela McCorduck's characterization of IPTO management style (1979,110). 20. In another interview, conducted by William Aspray (Sutherland 1989), Ivan Sutherland confirmed: "I would contrast the ARPA approach to sponsoring research with what I call the NIH and the NSF approaches, which are basically peer reVIew
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. So, In short, I really believed It, and qUIte a few people In the area here thought that somethIng really great was going to happen." Ivan Sutherland, his successor at IPTO, on the other hand, insisted that "the artificial intelligence people, I think, pioneered many of the advanced computing techniques: non-numeric
The Long History of the Future: Why Tomorrow's Technology Still Isn't Here
by Nicole Kobie · 3 Jul 2024 · 348pp · 119,358 words
dumped me. But I’m still in love with robotics.’ After finishing grad school in 1977, Raibert had the chance to discuss his work with Ivan Sutherland, whom we’ll meet in the next chapter as the creator of the first head-mounted display. Sutherland said he’d fund a robot. Which
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headset for playing games alone in your basement. And we’ve barely made VR headsets that work despite development stretching back to the 1960s, when Ivan Sutherland and his team of students built the first head-mounted display. * * * The first person to use what would eventually become known as an augmented reality
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darn thing on his head. And it’s no wonder he was concerned. As a student at Harvard in 1968, Quintin Foster was working under Ivan Sutherland, an academic already famous for his Sketchpad program that let the user draw as an input to a computer, a breakthrough that eventually led to
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speak but did attend the debate, noting at the panel discussion: ‘It is evidence of the eloquence of the Harvard faculty or the naivety of Ivan Sutherland that my opinion changed eight times during the debate.’ With that minor controversy over and the project a success, Sutherland left his tenured position at
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gauges, nausea-inducing red-only VR tripods, robots tripping over themselves. Building anything is hard. And science for the sake of science is worth celebrating. Ivan Sutherland made the first head-mounted augmented reality display, just to see how it would work, before setting aside the technology and spending his time solving
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, the story of Pong’s Bay Area origins.’ SFGate, March 10, 2023. https://biturl.top/3u2ayu Sproull, Robert and Brock, David C. ‘Oral History of Ivan Sutherland.’ Computer History Museum Oral History Project. February 3, 2017. https://biturl.top/zu2aim Suleman, Kidhr. ‘Google Glass review: hands-on.’ ITPro, July 18, 2014. https
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development costs here Eric Howlett and the LEEP system here, here Facebook and Meta here, here, here, here Google Glass smart spectacles here, here, here Ivan Sutherland VR headsets here, here Jaron Lanier here, here, here Jonathan Waldern here metaverse the here Microsoft HoloLens here motion sickness here, here, here, here, here
Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology
by Howard Rheingold · 14 May 2000 · 352pp · 120,202 words
Turing, Wiener, and von Neumann, the teacher of the first generation of artificial intelligence explorers like John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky, and the mentor of Ivan Sutherland, who has been one of the most important contemporary infonaut-architects. When Shannon's papers establishing information theory were published in 1948, he was thirty
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, very carefully prepared. In the early sixties, one of the extremely few students Shannon personally took on, another MIT bred prodigy by the name of Ivan Sutherland, made quite a splash on the computer science scene. By the mid-1970s, Shannon, now in his sixties, had become a literal gray eminence. By
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information from the innards of the new computers to the surface of various kinds of display screens. It was at this meeting, Licklider recalls, that Ivan Sutherland first took the stage in a spectacular way. "Sutherland was a graduate student at the time," Licklider remembers, "and he hadn't been invited to
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they had initiated: the creation of tools to enhance the thinking of individuals and augment communications among groups of people. Engelbart's group at SRI, Ivan Sutherland's computer graphics work at MIT and Harvard, David Evans and his students at the University of Utah, the Project MAC hackers at MIT, and
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managed to recruit for the Utah department who had an impact, not only on Alan Kay but on the entire course of personal computing was Ivan Sutherland, the graduate student and prot�g� of Claude Shannon and J. C. R. Licklider who single-handedly created the field of computer graphics as a
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& Sutherland was born. Kay showed up at Utah in November of 1966. His first task was to read a pile of manuscript Evans gave him -- Ivan Sutherland's thesis. The way Evans ran the graduate program, you weren't supposed to be around campus very long or very much. You were supposed
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his fantasy amplifier. Bob Taylor continues to catalyze the development of on-line intellectual communities. Evans & Sutherland is an extremely successful flight-simulation company, and Ivan Sutherland is a millionaire. But the idea people in universities and corporate laboratories, the research and development pioneers who made the technology possible, were not the
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hundred-million-dollar category, and Gates still has a couple more years before he reaches the age of thirty. Alan Kay and Bob Taylor and Ivan Sutherland have already been acknowledged for their past accomplishments, and look forward to the completion of their future projects under the auspices of well-funded and
Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots
by John Markoff · 24 Aug 2015 · 413pp · 119,587 words
felt like working in the enemy’s camp. Alan Kay had first envisioned the idea of personal computing while he was a graduate student under Ivan Sutherland at the University of Utah. Kay had seen Engelbart speak when the SRI researcher toured the country giving demonstrations of NLS, the software environment that
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Ph.D. as a junior engineer into a project that proved to be stultifyingly boring. Out of self-preservation, Raibert started following the work of Ivan Sutherland, who by 1977 was already a legend in computing. Sutherland’s 1962 MIT Ph.D. thesis project “Sketchpad” had been a major step forward in
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researchers designed the Alto computer. Smalltalk, the Alto’s software, was created by another PARC group led by computer scientist Alan Kay, a student of Ivan Sutherland at Utah. Looking for a way to compete with IBM in the emerging market for office computing, Xerox had set out to build a world
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Negroponte, an advocate of speech interfaces.5 Negroponte had created the Architecture Machine Group at MIT in 1967, in part inspired by the ideas of Ivan Sutherland, whose “Sketchpad” Ph.D. thesis was a seminal work in both computer graphics and interface design. Historians have underestimated Negroponte’s influence on Apple and
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affectionately in his Computer Lib manifesto as the “maddest of mad scientists.” In 1968, Negroponte, like many in the computing world, was deeply influenced by Ivan Sutherland’s 1963 Ph.D. project, Sketchpad, a graphical and interactive computing tool that pioneered human-computer interaction design. Following in Sutherland’s footsteps, Negroponte began
Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality
by Jaron Lanier · 21 Nov 2017 · 480pp · 123,979 words
a par with The Garden of Earthly Delights. Prize It was camouflaged, hidden in the most boring possible academic journal. I had finally stumbled upon Ivan Sutherland’s amazing work. These days, I am sometimes called the father of VR. My usual retort is that it depends on whether you believe the
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, processing, and output stages. But what if computers were running all the time, interacting with the world, embedded in the world? This is exactly what Ivan Sutherland had prototyped! “Cyber” comes from the Greek and is related to navigation. When you sail, you must constantly adjust to changes in wind and surf
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to get into video games. You might think I was interested because of Star Wars, but no, it was because a student of my hero Ivan Sutherland, a fellow named Ed Catmull, had started these digital efforts. I entered a big, unmarked industrial building and was greeted by a giant painting of
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, to be shared over dim sum. Alan Kay, arguably the principal visionary behind the way smartphones and PCs work today, and a former student of Ivan Sutherland’s, saw GRASP and said it was the best program ever written on a microprocessor (though one should be clear that his work at PARC
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quality. The worst problem with the early EyePhones was probably the weight. Weight was a huge problem for the first half century of VR goggles. Ivan Sutherland nicknamed the support for his 1969 ur-HMD the Sword of Damocles because it had to be hung from the ceiling. There was a death
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at least that you were in the robot’s location. The community that studied telepresence had started way back in the analog era, well before Ivan Sutherland, or even Alan Turing. Lately it has a broader usage, including Skype-like interactions in VR or mixed reality. “Tele-existence” was coined by the
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world, but most especially when there were other people in there with you. In a technological setting, “reality” could serve as the social version of Ivan Sutherland’s “world.” The hippie culture of the 1970s was obsessed with the idea of “consensus reality.” I’ve always been infuriated by sloppy New Age
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will turn out to be problems I never foresaw. Nothing is ever perfect. But this is the mind-set of computer science. You keep chasing. Ivan Sutherland has been pursuing “asynchronous” computer architectures for years now. These are hardware systems without a master clock, but the implication is deeper; that computation can
What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry
by John Markoff · 1 Jan 2005 · 394pp · 108,215 words
screen was one of the most difficult. People had pointed at blips on a radar screen in the SAGE early-warning system using light guns, Ivan Sutherland had designed a remarkable graphics program that worked with a light pen, but a pointing device that would let the computer user easily specify where
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in 1967, and the entire project was in danger of losing its funding until Bob Taylor came to Engelbart’s aid again. Taylor had replaced Ivan Sutherland as director of the ARPA Information Processing Technology Office in 1966 and soon discovered that Engelbart’s project was having financial problems. During this period
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larger grant, which he received, and he even had the audacity to ask ARPA to allow him to hire an executive officer. By that time, Ivan Sutherland, the designer of the brilliant Sketchpad drawing system, had succeeded Licklider. He told McCarthy he thought the notion of an executive officer was a great
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time he found an interesting one, he copied it for his files. In addition to Evans, Kay also came into contact with the work of Ivan Sutherland. The University of Utah was then the nation’s leading center of computer-graphics research. (Evans and Sutherland would found a pioneering computer graphics company
The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
by Walter Isaacson · 6 Oct 2014 · 720pp · 197,129 words
. He was fortunate as well in landing at the University of Utah. It had the best computer graphics program in the country, run by professors Ivan Sutherland and David Evans, and became one of the first four nodes on the ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet. (Other students included Jim Clark, who
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appreciation for how it worked made them well suited to designing the interfaces between humans and machines. When Licklider stepped down from IPTO, his deputy, Ivan Sutherland, took over temporarily, and at Licklider’s urging Taylor moved over from NASA to become Sutherland’s deputy. Taylor was among the few who realized
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analyzed how messages would flow and bottlenecks arise in switched data networks. In addition to sharing an office with Roberts, Kleinrock was a classmate of Ivan Sutherland and went to lectures by Claude Shannon and Norbert Wiener. “It was a real hotbed of intellectual brilliance,” he recalled of MIT at the time
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to be the first ARPANET nodes: UCLA, where Len Kleinrock worked; Stanford Research Institute (SRI), with the visionary Douglas Engelbart; the University of Utah, with Ivan Sutherland; and the University of California at Santa Barbara. They were given the task of figuring out how their big “host” computers would connect to the
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1966, Evans handed him a document from a stack on his desk and told him to read it. It was the MIT doctoral dissertation of Ivan Sutherland, who was then teaching at Harvard but would soon move to Utah. Written under the supervision of the information theorist Claude Shannon, the thesis was
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interview with Alan Kay. See also Alan Kay, “The Center of Why,” Kyoto Prize lecture, Nov. 11, 2004. 48. Author’s interview with Alan Kay; Ivan Sutherland, “Sketchpad,” PhD dissertation, MIT, 1963; Howard Rheingold, “Inventing the Future with Alan Kay,” The WELL, http://www.well.com/user/hlr/texts/Alan%20Kay. 49
Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution
by Howard Rheingold · 24 Dec 2011
-aware devices to explore applications in health care, entertainment, and collaborative work.16 “Bits and atoms” is a major theme at MIT’s Media Lab. Ivan Sutherland started it in 1965 with his dramatic statement that “the ultimate display would, of course, be a room within which the computer can control the
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technical difficulty by wanting to see the information in its context, overlaid on the real world. WorldBoard, Spohrer noted, combined, and extended the ideas of Ivan Sutherland, Warren Robinett, and Steven Feiner. Sutherland had invented computer-generated graphics in his MIT Ph.D. thesis in 1963.22 Computer graphics came a long
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