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The Remarkable Ivan Sutherland
- gaze 4y agoI 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.
- adapteva 4y agoWhiteboarding stuff in my office at DARPA with Ivan Sutherland is a memory I will treasure always. One of the original giants.
- jacquesm 4y agoThis 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.
- kragen 4y agothe 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
- jacquesm 4y agoI'm pretty sure that if we voluntarily limited all of our computers to 100 MHz, cut our bandwidth down to 500 Kbps and our storage allotment to 1G for all of our data that we'd see a new golden age in languages, communications protocols, and maybe even data compression.
- heyoni 4y agoI’d love to browse that web. It’s insane how fast my internet is yet everything takes a second to load anyway (looking at your Jira).
- djmips 4y agoIt will come some day.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- kragen 4y agowe probably wouldn't have developed stable diffusion and chatgpt
- jacquesm 4y agoExcellent!
- ginko 4y agoerror: invalid digit "9" in octal constant
- adamsmith 4y agoIvan 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 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.
- chj 4y ago[dead]
- ricochet11 4y ago"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
- abudabi123 4y agoOn yt there is a black and white interview with an engineer on the topic of geometry set in the 60s about one hour long.