Behold, the World’s Most Famous Teapot

Martin Newell was worried about his

a

Ph.D. research as he sat down to tea with his wife one day in 1974. His work, at the University of Utah, was in the relatively new field of computer graphics. Some years earlier, the computer scientists David Evans and Ivan Sutherland had come to Utah, transforming the university into the world’s leading center for computer graphics research.

Evans, who had deep family connections to Utah, was a rising star when the University of Utah, in Salt Lake City, had recruited him to start its computer science department in 1965. At the time, he’d been on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, and was one of the principal investigators on Project Genie [PDF]. This pathbreaking effort on time-shared computing was supported by the U.S. Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Administration, or ARPA.

In 1968, Evans lured Ivan Sutherland away from a tenured professorship at Harvard to join him in Utah at the computer science department, as well as at a new company the pair would form, Evans & Sutherland. Sutherland was a pioneer in computer graphics, beginning with his development of the famed Sketchpad software for his 1963 Ph.D. at MIT; his thesis advisor was Claude Shannon. Sketchpad is widely viewed as the first computer-aided design program. In this 1994 talk, Sutherland recounts how he created Sketchpad:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/history/behold-the-worlds-most-famous-teapot