Evans & Sutherland Founders Honored For Pioneering Work, Innovation In 3D Graphics; Partners/Visionaries Win Price Waterhouse Lifetime Achievement Award and Honors in the Smithsonian's Permanent Research Collection

Business Wire, June 3, 1996

SALT LAKE CITY--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 3, 1996--Evans & Sutherland Computer Corporation (E&S) (NASDAQ:ESCC) announced today that its founders, Dr. David C. Evans and Dr. Ivan E. Sutherland have received the 1996 Price Waterhouse Information Technology Leadership Award for Lifetime Achievement. This honor is to be conferred upon the two industry luminaries at the annual ComputerWorld Smithsonian Awards (CWSA) ceremony this evening, at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C.

The CWSA program, established in 1989, identifies and honors men and women whose visonary use of information technology (IT) produces positive social, economic, and educational change. These innovators, nominated by chairmen of the nation's leading IT companies, receive recognition and are accorded a permanent place in history in the Smithsonian Institution's National Information Technology Archive. Drs. Evans and Sutherland were nominated for the 1996 Leadership Award by a committee that included: Gwen Bell of The Computer Museum; John Seely Brown of Xerox Corporation; Robert Frankenberg of Novell, Inc.; and Alan Kay of Apple Computer, Inc. Past winners of Price Waterhouse Lifetime Achievement Awards include: William Hewlett and the late David Packard, Bill Gates, H. Ross Perot, and the late Thomas Watson, Jr. In academic and industrial careers that span more than 3 decades, Drs. Evans and Sutherland have been hailed by colleagues, students, and corporate leaders as a partnership of visionaries who enabled the creation of visual displays by general-purpose computers that synthesize motion, color, texture, and imagery.

"David Evans and Ivan Sutherland took computer graphics from ground zero to 3D systems for modeling, visualization, simulation, and virtual reality," says Scott Kaufman, Price Waterhouse partner and CWSA Chairman's Committee member. "They brought a vital dimension to information technology with dynamic tools for science, industry, and education -- virtually all the disciplines that affect our day-to-day lives."

"Many of the leaders of the computer graphics industry today were at one time students or colleagues of David and Ivan," according to Jim Oyler, President and CEO of Evans & Sutherland. "They represented the best of both a pioneering spirit and technical vision. They consistently viewed their work not just in commercial terms, but in terms of how it could improve people's lives."

Drs. Evans and Sutherland -- already renowned in the scientific and academic communities -- established the Computer Science Department at the University of Utah in the mid-1960s, focusing efforts on computer graphics. The result was an outpouring of ideas and trained students who spread this knowledge throughout the nation and the world. Their work spawned a large number of computer and high-technology firms, prominent CEOs, corporate presidents, and esteemed professors. Colleagues have attributed to the two men epithets such as the "father of computer graphics" and "inventor of virtual reality." Throughout their life's work, these partners developed revolutionary techniques for computerized visualization, which has become synonymous with computing and computerized modeling, now widely used for predicting the behavior of product designs. Without visualization, there would not have been mass computer usage; without modeling, engineers would still have to build prototypes to find out if their designs worked -- and if they were safe.

David Evans, graduated from the University of Utah in 1953, spent 9 years at the Computer Division of the Bendix Corporation, where he led the development of what may have been the first interactive computer, and where he performed pioneering work in numerical control of machine tools. In 1962, Evans was appointed Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley, where his group pioneered a multi-user time sharing system, later marketed by Zerox Data Systems as the XDS 940 and considered one of the early, successful time sharing systems. In 1965, he accepted the position as Chairman and Professor of the University of Utah's Computer Science Department, which he organized and for which he recruited prominent academic talent, including Dr. Sutherland. Dr. Sutherland's pioneering work at MIT included a widely acclaimed graphic system called "Sketchpad," that demonstrated interactive graphics for the first time. He subsequently taught at Harvard where he devised the first head-mounted display, demonstrating in 1967 what is now called "virtual reality." His subsequent computer research includes important work in robotics, self-timed logic, circuits, computer architecture, and chip interconnection technology. Currently vice president and Fellow at Sun Microsystems, he was previously with his own consulting firm, Sutherland, Sproull and Associates. He was a founding partner in 1980 of Advanced Technology Ventures, now in its fourth fund. He served as Fletcher Jones Professor of Computer Science and was department head at Caltech in the late 1970s. Prior to co-founding E&S in 1968, he worked on research projects at the U.S. Dept. of Defense, Harvard, and MIT, from which he received his PhD in 1963. Dr. Sutherland is the author of 12 patents as well as numerous publications and lectures.