Evans & Sutherland is a pioneering American
computer
A computer is a machine that can be programmed to Execution (computing), carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (computation) automatically. Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as C ...
firm in the
computer graphics
Computer graphics deals with generating images with the aid of computers. Today, computer graphics is a core technology in digital photography, film, video games, cell phone and computer displays, and many specialized applications. A great de ...
field. Its current products are used in digital projection environments like
planetarium
A planetarium ( planetariums or ''planetaria'') is a theatre built primarily for presenting educational and entertaining shows about astronomy and the night sky, or for training in celestial navigation.
A dominant feature of most planetarium ...
s. Its simulation business, which it sold to
Rockwell Collins
Rockwell Collins was a multinational corporation headquartered in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, providing avionics and information technology systems and services to government agencies and aircraft manufacturers. It was formed when the Collins Radio Comp ...
, sold products that were used primarily by the
military
A military, also known collectively as armed forces, is a heavily armed, highly organized force primarily intended for warfare. It is typically authorized and maintained by a sovereign state, with its members identifiable by their distinct ...
and large industrial firms for training and
simulation
A simulation is the imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time. Simulations require the use of Conceptual model, models; the model represents the key characteristics or behaviors of the selected system or proc ...
.
History
The company was founded in 1968 by
David C. Evans
David Cannon Evans (February 24, 1924 – October 3, 1998) was the founder of the computer science department at the University of Utah and co-founder (with Ivan Sutherland) of Evans & Sutherland, a pioneering firm in computer graphics hardwar ...
and
Ivan Sutherland
Ivan Edward Sutherland (born May 16, 1938) is an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer, widely regarded as a pioneer of computer graphics. His early work in computer graphics as well as his teaching with David C. Evans in that subje ...
, professors in the Computer Science Department at the
University of Utah
The University of Utah (U of U, UofU, or simply The U) is a public research university in Salt Lake City, Utah. It is the flagship institution of the Utah System of Higher Education. The university was established in 1850 as the University of De ...
. who were pioneers in
computer graphics
Computer graphics deals with generating images with the aid of computers. Today, computer graphics is a core technology in digital photography, film, video games, cell phone and computer displays, and many specialized applications. A great de ...
technology. They formed the company to produce hardware to run the systems being developed in the University, working from an abandoned
barracks
Barracks are usually a group of long buildings built to house military personnel or laborers. The English word originates from the 17th century via French and Italian from an old Spanish word "barraca" ("soldier's tent"), but today barracks are u ...
on the university grounds. The company was later housed in the
University of Utah Research Park
The University of Utah Research Park, also known as Bionic Valley, is located on the campus of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, United States. The facility has helped create many businesses based on the work of university scientists over ...
. Most of the employees were active or former students, and included
Jim Clark
James Clark Jr. OBE (4 March 1936 – 7 April 1968) was a British Formula One racing driver from Scotland, who won two World Championships, in 1963 and 1965. A versatile driver, he competed in sports cars, touring cars and in the Indianapol ...
, who started
Silicon Graphics
Silicon Graphics, Inc. (stylized as SiliconGraphics before 1999, later rebranded SGI, historically known as Silicon Graphics Computer Systems or SGCS) was an American high-performance computing manufacturer, producing computer hardware and soft ...
,
Ed Catmull
Edwin Earl "Ed" Catmull (born March 31, 1945) is an American computer scientist who is the co-founder of Pixar and was the President of Walt Disney Animation Studios. He has been honored for his contributions to 3D computer graphics (computer sci ...
, co-founder of
Pixar
Pixar Animation Studios (commonly known as Pixar () and stylized as P I X A R) is an American computer animation studio known for its critically and commercially successful computer animated feature films. It is based in Emeryville, Californi ...
,
John Warnock
John Edward Warnock (born October 6, 1940) is an American computer scientist and businessman best known for co-founding Adobe Systems Inc., the graphics and publishing software company, with Charles Geschke. Warnock was President of Adobe for ...
of
Adobe
Adobe ( ; ) is a building material made from earth and organic materials. is Spanish for ''mudbrick''. In some English-speaking regions of Spanish heritage, such as the Southwestern United States, the term is used to refer to any kind of e ...
, and Scott P. Hunter of
Oracle
An oracle is a person or agency considered to provide wise and insightful counsel or prophetic predictions, most notably including precognition of the future, inspired by deities. As such, it is a form of divination.
Description
The word '' ...
.
In the early 1970s they purchased
General Electric
General Electric Company (GE) is an American multinational conglomerate founded in 1892, and incorporated in New York state and headquartered in Boston. The company operated in sectors including healthcare, aviation, power, renewable energ ...
's flight simulator division and formed a partnership with
Rediffusion Simulation
Thales Training & Simulation Ltd. is a multinational company which manufactures simulators, including full flight simulators and military simulators, and provides related training and support services. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Th ...
, a
UK-based
flight simulator
A flight simulator is a device that artificially re-creates aircraft flight and the environment in which it flies, for pilot training, design, or other purposes. It includes replicating the equations that govern how aircraft fly, how they rea ...
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
A cockpit or flight deck is the area, usually near the front of an aircraft or spacecraft, from which a Pilot in command, pilot controls the aircraft.
The cockpit of an aircraft contains flight instruments on an instrument panel, and the ...
to daytime light levels. These simulators were used for training in in-flight refueling, carrier landing, AWACS, and B52.
Later in the 1970s the company expanded their line of simulation systems, first building a five-projector graphics system to simulate a ship steaming into New York Harbor and through its surroundings. This graphics system was installed on the mock-up of a ship's bridge and used to train ship's pilots how to navigate into and out of New York Harbor. The project, called CAORF (Computer Aided Operations Research Facility), was built for the US Maritime Academy. The project paved the way for other visual simulation systems including a NASA Space Shuttle manipulator arm, EVS, submarine periscope and space station docking simulators.
In the mid 1970s until the end of the 1980s, E&S produced the
LDS-1 (Line Drawing System-1)
LDS-1 (Line Drawing System-1) was a calligraphic (vector, rather than raster) display processor and display device created by Evans & Sutherland. This model was known as the first graphics device with a graphics processing unit.
Features
It wa ...
, ''Picture System'' 1, 2 and PS300 series. These unique "calligraphic" (analog vector drawing) color displays had depth cueing and could draw large wireframe models and manipulate (rotate, shift, zoom) them in real time. They were used both in chemistry by pharmaceutical companies to visualize large molecules such as enzymes or polynucleotides, and by aerospace companies, such as Boeing, McDonnell-Douglas and others, to design aircraft. The end of the Picture System line came in the late 1980s, when raster devices on workstations could render anti-aliased lines faster.
In 1978 the company went public with a listing on
NASDAQ
The Nasdaq Stock Market () (National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations Stock Market) is an American stock exchange based in New York City. It is the most active stock trading venue in the US by volume, and ranked second ...
.
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
Digistar is the first computer graphics-based planetarium projection and content system. It was designed by Evans & Sutherland and released in 1983. The technology originally focused on accurate and high quality display of stars, including for the ...
1 and
2 systems installed around the world, such as at the
Saint Louis Science Center
The Saint Louis Science Center, founded as a planetarium in 1963, is a collection of buildings including a science museum and planetarium in St. Louis, Missouri, on the southeastern corner of Forest Park. With over 750 exhibits in a complex of ov ...
in
St. Louis, Missouri
St. Louis () is the second-largest city in Missouri, United States. It sits near the confluence of the Mississippi River, Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers. In 2020, the city proper had a population of 301,578, while the Greater St. Louis, ...
.
In the mid-1980s Evans & Sutherland introduced a geometric modeling system called CDRS, that provided high quality surface design capabilities together with a photo-realistic rendering system. CDRS was sold to many well known manufacturers including both Ford & Chrysler. CDRS was acquired by
Parametric Technology Corporation
PTC Inc. (formerly Parametric Technology Corporation) is an American computer software and services company founded in 1985 and headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. The global technology company has over 6,000 employees across 80 offices in ...
in 1995.
For a brief period between 1986 and 1989 E&S was also a
supercomputer
A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second ( FLOPS) instead of million instructions ...
vendor, but their
ES-1 was released just as the supercomputer market was drying up in the post-
cold war
The Cold War is a term commonly used to refer to a period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc. The term '' cold war'' is used because the ...
military wind-down. Only a handful of machines were built, most broken up for scrap. One sample ES-1 is in storage at the
Computer History Museum
The Computer History Museum (CHM) is a museum of computer history, located in Mountain View, California. The museum presents stories and artifacts of Silicon Valley and the information age, and explores the computing revolution and its impact on ...
.
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, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the ...
,
IBM,
Hewlett Packard
The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. HP developed and provided a wide variety of hardware components ...
, and
DEC 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
was a Japanese multinational corporation, multinational video game and entertainment company, headquartered in Ōta, Tokyo. It held several international branches, including Namco America in Santa Clara, California, Namco Europe in London, Na ...
with texture-mapping technology in Namco's System 22 arcade board that powered ''
Ridge Racer
is a racing game, racing video game series developed and published for arcade systems and home game consoles by Bandai Namco Entertainment, formerly Namco. The first game, ''Ridge Racer (1993 video game), Ridge Racer'' (1993), was originally rel ...
''. 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.
In 1998 Evans and Sutherland acquired AccelGraphics Inc, a manufacturer of computer graphics boards, for $52m.
Since its launch in July 2002, the company's Digistar 3 system became the world's fastest selling Digital Theater system and is installed in upwards of 120
fulldome
Fulldome refers to immersive dome-based video display environments. The dome, horizontal or tilted, is filled with real-time (interactive) or pre-rendered (linear) computer animations, live capture images, or composited environments.
Although t ...
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.
In 2006 Evans and Sutherland sold its simulation business, which for decades was the core of the company, to
Rockwell Collins
Rockwell Collins was a multinational corporation headquartered in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, providing avionics and information technology systems and services to government agencies and aircraft manufacturers. It was formed when the Collins Radio Comp ...
.
On February 10, 2020 Elevate Entertainment and Evans & Sutherland announced that Elevate would purchase E&S for $1.19 per share in cash in a transaction valued at $14,500,000.
Use in movies and special effects
An Evans & Sutherland computer was used in the creation of the Project Genesis simulation sequence in ''
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan'' (1982). The star fields, and the tactical bridge displays on the
''Kobayashi Maru'' simulator and
USS ''Enterprise'' were created by Evans & Sutherland employees and filmed directly from the screen of a prototype
Digistar system at company headquarters. This film was one of the first ever to use computer graphics (after ''
Futureworld
''Futureworld'' is a 1976 American science fiction thriller film directed by Richard T. Heffron and written by Mayo Simon and George Schenck. It is a sequel to the 1973 Michael Crichton film ''Westworld'', and is the second installment in the ...
'' in 1976). Star fields and some of the other shots were reused in ''
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock'' (1984) and later films.
NBC
The National Broadcasting Company (NBC) is an Television in the United States, American English-language Commercial broadcasting, commercial television network, broadcast television and radio network. The flagship property of the NBC Enterta ...
would later use an Evans & Sutherland Picture System 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!".
Products
Terminals
*
LDS-1 (Line Drawing System-1)
LDS-1 (Line Drawing System-1) was a calligraphic (vector, rather than raster) display processor and display device created by Evans & Sutherland. This model was known as the first graphics device with a graphics processing unit.
Features
It wa ...
* Picture System
* Picture System 2
* PS/300 Picture System (variations included PS/340 which could render a still frame image using an internal framebuffer)
* PS/390 Picture System/390 (first to use a raster scan display as the primary monitor)
Workstations
*
VAXstation 8000
::(Co-developed graphics accelerator with
DEC)
* ESV/3
* ESV/10
* ESV/50
Accelerators
* Freedom series
Simulation
image generator
This is a glossary of terms relating to computer graphics.
For more general computer hardware terms, see glossary of computer hardware terms
This glossary of computer hardware terms is a list of definitions of terms and concepts related to com ...
s
* Novoview SP1 and SP2 (the 6000 light systems)
* SPX
* CT5
* ESIG-2000
* ESIG-3000
* ESIG-4000
* Harmony
* EPX
Simulation display products
* CSM (Caligraphic Shadowmask Monitor)
* VistaView head-tracked projector
* TargetView
* TargetView 200
* ESCP raster/calligraphic projector
Planetarium products
*
Digistar
Digistar is the first computer graphics-based planetarium projection and content system. It was designed by Evans & Sutherland and released in 1983. The technology originally focused on accurate and high quality display of stars, including for the ...
(1983)
* Digistar II (1995)
* Digistar 3 (2002)
* Digistar 4 (2008)
* Digistar 5 (2012)
* Digistar 6 (2016)
* Digistar 7 (2020)
Modeling Systems
CDRS
Supercomputers
*
ES-1
References
External links
*
Rockwell Collins official website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Evans and Sutherland
Computer companies of the United States
Graphics hardware companies
Manufacturing companies based in Salt Lake City
1968 establishments in Utah
Planetarium projection