Evans and Sutherland

Evans and Sutherland is a computer firm involved in the computer graphics field. Their products are used primarily by the military and large industrial firms for training and simulation, and in digital projection environments like planetariums.

E&S was formed when David Evans recruited Ivan Sutherland to join him at the University of Utah in 1968. Evans had started the new Computer Science Department and was looking for a niche the university could compete in. At the time that was artificial intelligence or computer graphics, and realizing that the former was essentially locked up by the larger universities like MIT he decided on the latter.

Sutherland was perhaps one of the most famous people working in the graphics field. He had previously worked on the seminal Sketchpad Project at MIT in 1963, and had since invented the first 3-D display that we would now call virtual reality. The two had met earlier while working on DARPA projects so he was a natural for Evans to hire.

The result was that for a time right into the 1970's, the University of Utah was the place to be if you were interested in graphics. E&S meanwhile focussed on the hardware side, working from an abandoned barracks on the university grounds. Most of the employees were active or former students, as you might expect, and the list reads like a who's-who of the industry. Examples include Jim Clark, who started Silicon Graphics, Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar, and John Warnock of Adobe.