May 16, 1938 — Ivan Sutherland Was Born

Ivan Sutherland was born on May 16, 1938. He is often called one of the creators of modern computer graphics.

In 1963, while studying at MIT, Sutherland created a program called Sketchpad. Today it looks like a normal graphics editor, but at the time it was revolutionary. Sketchpad allowed users to draw objects directly on the screen with a light pen, move them around, copy them, define relationships between elements, and work with them in ways that feel surprisingly similar to modern CAD systems or Figma.

Many ideas that now seem completely standard — windows, interactive graphics, object-oriented manipulation, and geometric constraints between elements — were first demonstrated in Sketchpad.

Later, Ivan Sutherland and his student Bob Sproull created a device that is now considered one of the first virtual reality headsets. It was called The Sword of Damocles. The headset was so heavy that it had to be suspended from the ceiling.

Sutherland also worked at DARPA and taught at both Harvard and the University of Utah, where he trained an entire generation of future computer graphics pioneers. People who later contributed to Pixar, Silicon Graphics, and modern 3D technologies passed through his labs.

Interestingly, the very idea of interacting with a computer in real time seemed strange to many people in the early 1960s. Computers were mostly seen as enormous machines for batch calculations, not as tools for drawing, design, or creativity.

For decades, Ivan Sutherland continued developing the idea of graphics in computing — and succeeded. Today it is almost impossible to imagine computers without graphics.