Ivan Sutherland and his robot crawler, 1983

In 1982, Ivan Sutherland got on a six-legged walking robot he had built and took his first ride. His students at Carnegie Mellon Institute called the eight foot long machine “The Trojan Cockroach.” To Sutherland it was as an “electric animal,” which he made because he thought it would be fun. Fun has always been Sutherland’s inspiration.

When denied my minimum daily adult dose of technology, I get grouchy. I believe that technology is fun, especially when computers are involved, a sort of grand game or puzzle with ever so neat parts to fit together. I have turned down several lucrative administrative jobs because they would deny me that fun. If the technology you do isn’t fun for you, you may wish to seek other employment. Without the fun, none of us would go on.”

The Trojan Cockroach was the first computer controlled robot that could carry a human being. But it is merely a footnote in the life of the man known as “Father Ivan,” since he is the person who gave birth to computer graphics and who, along with his many students, helped usher in the Computer Age.

Sketchpad

Sketchpad demonstrated in 1963.

Computer graphics was born in 1962. Its twenty-four year old father, Ivan Sutherland, was then a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his child, who he named Sketchpad, was his doctoral thesis. Sutherland’s program for MIT’s TX2 computer enabled him to draw directly on its nine-inch cathode ray tube with a light pen. For the first time in history, digital images were created by hand and appeared as the artist was working on them (rather than in a printout hours later). Continue reading →