Ivan Edward Sutherland was the inventor of Sketchpad, an innovate program that influenced alternative forms of interaction with computers. Sketchpad ran on the Lincoln TX-2 computer and influenced Douglas Engelbart's On-Line System as well as the development of the graphical user interface. Sketchpad, in turn, was influenced by the conceptual Memex as envisioned by Vannevar Bush in his famous paper "As We May Think".
For his invention of Sketchpad and related work, Sutherland received the Turing Award in 1988.
Sutherland earned his Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from the Carnegie Institute of Technology (known now as Carnegie-Mellon University), his Master's degree from Caltech, and his Ph.D. from MIT. With his friend and colleague Dave Evans, he established Evans and Sutherland, a company that has done pioneering work in the field of real-time hardware acclerated 3D computer graphics and printer languages. Former employees of Evans and Sutherland included the future founders of Adobe (John Warnock ) and Silicon Graphics (Jim Clark).