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A Who's Who of Computer WizzesThe remarkable work of University of Utah faculty and staff, in the late 1960s and early 1970s in particular, has led to several billion-dollar industries in the high-tech field. Here is a partial Who's Who: • Alan Ashton BA’66 PhD’70—Cofounded WordPerfect. • Bob Barton, Faculty (1968–1973)—Inventor of stack machine architecture; principal architect of Burroughs computers. • Jim Blinn PhD'78—Currently a graphics fellow at Microsoft Research, Blinn devised environment mapping and bump mapping, new methods to represent how objects and light interact in a 3-D virtual world. His simulations of the Voyager spacecraft fly-bys of Jupiter and Saturn have been seen widely. He also created animation for two television series: Carl Sagan's Cosmos: A Personal Voyage and The Mechanical Universe. • Nolan Bushnell BS’69—Recognized as the “Father of the Video Game Industry” for creating Atari, which produced Pong, the first popular computer game in the world. Later founded more than 20 other companies, including Chuck E. Cheese pizza and, most recently, the uWink Media Bistro video game restaurants. • Duane Call PhD’71—Cofounded Computer System Architects (CSA) and the Brigham Young University Computer Science Department. • Ed Catmull BS’69 PhD’74—Made significant advances in texturing and adding realistic dimension to computer graphics. Started George Lucas’ Lucasfilm’s computer division. Cofounded Pixar Animation Studios. Now president of both Pixar studios and Disney Feature Animation. • Jim Clark PhD’74—Developed a computer chip for imaging workstations, revolutionizing computer graphics. Founded Silicon Graphics, cofounded Mosaic Communications (which became Netscape), and founded Healtheon (which merged with WebMD). • Frank Crow PhD’76—Developed anti-aliasing methods for edge smoothing. • Al Davis PhD’72—A pioneer in asynchronous circuits and dataflow computation. Now a professor at the University of Utah. • David Evans BA’49 PhD’53, Chair (1965–1973), Faculty (1973–1980); and Ivan Sutherland, Faculty (1968–1974)—Founded Evans & Sutherland, a defining force in flight simulation, digital theater, and planetarium technology. Evans died in 1998; Sutherland is currently a vice president and Fellow at Sun Microsystems and a visiting scholar in the Computer Science Division at UC-Berkeley. • Henry Fuchs PhD’75—Has developed rendering algorithms (BSP Trees), hardware (Pixel-Planes and PixelFlow), virtual environments, tele-immersion systems and medical applications. • Henri Gouraud PhD’71—Developed the Gouraud shading method for polygon smoothing, a rendering method that dramatically improves the appearance of objects on a computer screen. • Jim Kajiya PhD’79—Developed the frame buffer concept for storing and displaying single-raster images. Received an Academy Award for a groundbreaking technique for creating computer-generated images of fur and hair. • Alan Kay MS’68 PhD’69—Pioneered the laptop computer. Developed object-oriented programming and the overlapping windows interface. Cofounded Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Was a Xerox Fellow, Chief Scientist of Atari, Apple Fellow, Disney Fellow, and HP Senior Fellow. Now president of Viewpoints Research Institute, Inc. • Martin Newell PhD’75, Faculty (1977-79)—Developed procedural modeling for object rendering (e.g. the famous "Utah teapot"; see the short article here), and codeveloped the painter's algorithm for surface rendering. • Ray Noorda BS’49—A peer of Dave Evans, Noorda helped build Novell, Inc., creator of WordPerfect and NetWare, and promoted the concept of computer networking when few others were believers. • Fred Parke PhD'74—Developed a parametric model for human faces that combined facial expressions and vocals with the animation. • Ron Resch, Faculty (1970–1979)—The first computer artist to build a sculpture designed entirely on a computer. • Chuck Seitz, Faculty (1970–1973)—A pioneer in asynchronous circuits; codesigned the first graphics machine; founded Myricom. • Tom Stockham, Faculty (1969–1981)—Invented digital recording; pioneered music CDs; coinvented Bose speakers. • Bui Tuong-Phong PhD’75—Invented the Phong shading method for capturing highlights in graphical images. • John Warnock BS’61 MS’64 PhD’69—Developed PostScript, the first desktop publishing and printing standard; cofounded Adobe Systems. |