The Remarkable Ivan Sutherland

Ivan Sutherland wrote one of my all-time favorite pieces, called Technology and Courage. It's a short read, here: https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~wgg/smli_ps-1.pdf

He talks about the courage it takes to do risky work in our field, and gives practical techniques for overcoming barriers, such as having collaborators, deadlines, "just get started", stock compensation, etc.

Dr Sutherland also discusses the courage to keep going, or even _stop_ working on a project.

Given his broad background, he discusses how these dynamics play out in a wide range of fields, including education, startups, and research.

For me it is always a visceral read.

Whiteboarding stuff in my office at DARPA with Ivan Sutherland is a memory I will treasure always. One of the original giants.

This article talks about him in the past tense because all of what happened is very much in the past, but Ivan Sutherland is alive and well.

the article really undersells sutherland, and sketchpad in particular

consider that in 01963 in sketchpad he demonstrated guis, constraint programming, a visual programming language (though not a general one), cad, and a way of structuring the sketchpad program that alan kay later described as being object-oriented, all on a computer that ran at somewhere around 0.1 mips (albeit simd mips)

and e&s can reasonably be understood as the first gpu vendor, though of course they didn't use that term, and for a long time their graphics weren't raster

I met him a few years ago when he gave a talk at Yale and had lunch with him shortly after. He was quite interested in asynchronous logic. I think he was starting a group at portland state or something. Definitely an interesting guy.

"The Sketchpad system makes it possible for a man and a computer to converse rapidly through the medium of line drawings. Heretofore, most interaction between men and computers has been slowed down by the need to reduce all communication to written statements that can be typed" - Sutherland

came across this the other day, funny after all the recent chatgpt hype