Evans & Sutherland
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Evans & 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.
David Evans had started the new Computer Science Department at the University of Utah and was looking for a niche the university could compete in. At the time the hot fields were 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.
Ivan Sutherland was perhaps one of the most famous people working in the graphics field. He had previously worked on the seminal Sketchpad 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 Evans recruited him to join the university in 1968. The result was that for a time right into the 1970s, the University of Utah was the place to be if you were interested in graphics.
Looking to produce hardware to run the systems being developed in the University, the two set up E&S, 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.
In the early 1970s they formed a partnership with Rediffusion, a UK-based flight simulator company, to design and build digital flight simulators. This remains E&S's primary market to this day, delivering display systems with enough brightness to light up the simulator cockpit to daytime light levels. In the 1980s they added their other major arm, supplying all-digital projectors for planetariums.
For a brief period between 1986 and 1989 E&S was also a supercomputer vendor, but their ES-1 was released just as the supercomputer market was drying up in the post-cold war military wind-down. Only a handful of machines were built, most broken up for scrap.
The current CEO is James Oyler, who joined the company in 1994 when David Evans retired.