Evans & Sutherland
Encyclopedia
Evans & Sutherland is a computer
Computer
A computer is a programmable machine designed to sequentially and automatically carry out a sequence of arithmetic or logical operations. The particular sequence of operations can be changed readily, allowing the computer to solve more than one kind of problem...

 firm involved in the computer graphics
Computer graphics
Computer graphics are graphics created using computers and, more generally, the representation and manipulation of image data by a computer with help from specialized software and hardware....

 field. Their products are used primarily by the military and large industrial firms for training and simulation
Simulation
Simulation is the imitation of some real thing available, state of affairs, or process. The act of simulating something generally entails representing certain key characteristics or behaviours of a selected physical or abstract system....

, and in digital projection environments like planetarium
Planetarium
A planetarium is a theatre built primarily for presenting educational and entertaining shows about astronomy and the night sky, or for training in celestial navigation...

s.

History

The company was founded in 1968 by David Evans
David C. Evans
David Cannon Evans was the founder of the computer science department at the University of Utah and co-founder of Evans & Sutherland, a computer firm which is known as a pioneer in the domain of computer-generated imagery.-Biography:Evans attended the University of Utah and studied electrical...

 and Ivan Sutherland
Ivan Sutherland
Ivan Edward Sutherland is an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer. He received the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 1988 for the invention of Sketchpad, an early predecessor to the sort of graphical user interface that has become ubiquitous in personal...

, professors in the Computer Science Department at the University of Utah
University of Utah
The University of Utah, also known as the U or the U of U, is a public, coeducational research university in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States. The university was established in 1850 as the University of Deseret by the General Assembly of the provisional State of Deseret, making it Utah's oldest...

.

The two professors were pioneers in computer graphics
Computer graphics
Computer graphics are graphics created using computers and, more generally, the representation and manipulation of image data by a computer with help from specialized software and hardware....

 technology. They formed the company to produce hardware to run the systems being developed in the University, working from an abandoned barracks
Barracks
Barracks are specialised buildings for permanent military accommodation; the word may apply to separate housing blocks or to complete complexes. Their main object is to separate soldiers from the civilian population and reinforce discipline, training and esprit de corps. They were sometimes called...

 on the university grounds. The company was later housed in the University of Utah Research Park
University of Utah Research Park
The University of Utah Research Park is located on the campus of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, United States.-History:In 1970, of land was declared as surplus by Fort Douglas and was set aside for the creation of the research park....

. Most of the employees were active or former students, and included Jim Clark
James H. Clark
James H. Clark is an American entrepreneur and computer scientist. He founded several notable Silicon Valley technology companies, including Silicon Graphics, Inc., Netscape Communications Corporation, myCFO and Healtheon...

, who started Silicon Graphics
Silicon Graphics
Silicon Graphics, Inc. was a manufacturer of high-performance computing solutions, including computer hardware and software, founded in 1981 by Jim Clark...

, Ed Catmull
Edwin Catmull
Dr. Edwin Earl Catmull, Ph.D. is a computer scientist and current president of Walt Disney Animation Studios and Pixar Animation Studios. As a computer scientist, Catmull has contributed to many important developments in computer graphics....

, co-founder of Pixar
Pixar
Pixar Animation Studios, pronounced , is an American computer animation film studio based in Emeryville, California. The studio has earned 26 Academy Awards, seven Golden Globes, and three Grammy Awards, among many other awards and acknowledgments. Its films have made over $6.3 billion worldwide...

, and John Warnock
John Warnock
John Edward Warnock is an American computer scientist best known as the co-founder with Charles Geschke of Adobe Systems Inc., the graphics and publishing software company. Dr. Warnock was President of Adobe for his first two years and Chairman and CEO for his remaining sixteen years at the company...

 of Adobe
Adobe Systems
Adobe Systems Incorporated is an American computer software company founded in 1982 and headquartered in San Jose, California, United States...

.

In the 1970s they formed a partnership with Rediffusion Simulation, a UK
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

-based flight simulator
Flight simulator
A flight simulator is a device that artificially re-creates aircraft flight and various aspects of the flight environment. This includes the equations that govern how aircraft fly, how they react to applications of their controls and other aircraft systems, and how they react to the external...

 company, to design and build digital flight simulators. For the next three decades this was E&S's primary market, delivering display systems with enough brightness to light up a simulator cockpit
Cockpit
A cockpit or flight deck is the area, usually near the front of an aircraft, from which a pilot controls the aircraft. Most modern cockpits are enclosed, except on some small aircraft, and cockpits on large airliners are also physically separated from the cabin...

 to daytime light levels.

In the mid 70s until the end of the 80s, E&S produced the Picture System 1, 2 and PS300 series. These unique "calligraphic" (vector) color displays had depth cueing and could draw large wireframe models and manipulate (rotate, shift, zoom) them in real time. They were mainly used in chemistry to visualize large molecules such as enzymes or polynucleotides. The end of the Picture System line came in the late 80s, when raster devices on workstations could render anti-aliased lines faster.

In 1978 the company went public with a listing on NASDAQ
NASDAQ
The NASDAQ Stock Market, also known as the NASDAQ, is an American stock exchange. "NASDAQ" originally stood for "National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations". It is the second-largest stock exchange by market capitalization in the world, after the New York Stock Exchange. As of...

.

In the 1980s E&S added a Digital Theater division, supplying all-digital projectors to create immersive mass-audience experiences at planetariums, visitor attractions and similar education and entertainment venues. Digital Theater grew to become a major arm of E&S commercial activity with hundreds of Digistar 1 and 2 systems installed around the world, such as at the Saint Louis Science Center in St. Louis, Missouri
St. Louis, Missouri
St. Louis is an independent city on the eastern border of Missouri, United States. With a population of 319,294, it was the 58th-largest U.S. city at the 2010 U.S. Census. The Greater St...

.

For a brief period between 1986 and 1989 E&S was also a supercomputer
Supercomputer
A supercomputer is a computer at the frontline of current processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation.Supercomputers are used for highly calculation-intensive tasks such as problems including quantum physics, weather forecasting, climate research, molecular modeling A supercomputer is a...

 vendor, but their ES-1
Evans & Sutherland ES-1
The ES-1 was Evans & Sutherland's abortive attempt to enter the supercomputer market. About to be released just as the market was drying up in the post-cold war military wind-down, only a handful were built and only two sold....

 was released just as the supercomputer market was drying up in the post-cold war
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...

 military wind-down. Only a handful of machines were built, most broken up for scrap.

During the 1990s E&S tried to expand into several other commercial markets. The Freedom Series graphics engine was developed to work with Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...

, IBM
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...

, Hewlett Packard, and DEC
Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation was a major American company in the computer industry and a leading vendor of computer systems, software and peripherals from the 1960s to the 1990s...

 workstations. 3D Pro technology was developed for the first wave of 3D graphics cards for PCs. Also, the MindSet virtual set system was created to address the needs of the broadcast video market.

In 1993 Evans and Sutherland helped Japanese arcade giant Namco
Namco
is a Japanese corporation best known as a former video game developer and publisher. Following a merger with Bandai in September 2005, the two companies' game production assets were spun off into Namco Bandai Games on March 31, 2006. Namco Ltd. was re-established to continue domestic operation of...

 with texture-mapping technology in Namco's System 22 arcade board that powered Ridge Racer. The help that E&S gave Namco was similar to the help that Martin Marietta gave Sega with the MODEL 2 board that powered Daytona USA and Desert Tank arcade games.

Since its launch in July 2002, the company's Digistar 3
Digistar 3
Digistar 3 is a dome-based projection technology created by Evans & Sutherland - to offer audiences immersive entertainment and education experiences that integrate fulldome video, real time 3D computer graphics, and a digital planetarium facility...

 system became the world's fastest selling Digital Theater system and is installed in upwards of 120 fulldome
Fulldome
Fulldome refers to immersive dome-based video projection environments. The dome, horizontal or tilted, is filled with real-time or pre-rendered computer animations, live capture images, or composited environments....

 venues worldwide.

On May 9, 2006 Evans & Sutherland acquired Spitz Inc, a rival vendor in the planetarium market, giving the combined business the largest base of installed planetaria worldwide and adding in-house projection-dome manufacturing capability to E&S' offering.

Use in movies and special effects

An Evans and Sutherland computer was used in the creation of the Project Genesis simulation sequence in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, which was one of the first computer graphic sequences ever used in a movie. NBC
NBC
The National Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network and former radio network headquartered in the GE Building in New York City's Rockefeller Center with additional major offices near Los Angeles and in Chicago...

 would later use an Evans and Sutherland for its 1984-1985 promotional campaign "Let's All Be There!", as well as subsequent campaigns, concluding with the 1989-1990 season promotional campaign "Come Home to the Best!".

Terminals

  • LDS-1 (Line Drawing System-1)
    LDS-1 (Line Drawing System-1)
    LDS-1 was an attached calligraphic processor with a workstation terminal created by Evans & Sutherland. It was controlled by a variety of host computers. Straight lines were smoothly rendered in real-time animation. General principles of operation were similar to the systems used today - 4x4...

  • Picture System
  • Picture System II
  • PS/300 Picture System
  • PS/390 Picture System/390

Workstations

  • VAXstation 8000 (Co-developed the graphics accelerator with Digital Equipment Corporation Inc. )
  • ESV/3
  • ESV/10
  • ESV/50

Simulation Display Products

  • VistaView head-tracked projector
  • TargetView
  • TargetView 200
  • ESCP raster/calligraphic projector


External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK