Evans & Sutherland

Infobox_Company
company_name = Evans and Sutherland Computer Corporation
company_type = Public (nasdaq|ESCC)
foundation = Salt Lake City, Utah (1968)
location = Salt Lake City, Utah, USA
revenue = profit$69.2 million USD (2004)
num_employees = ~275 (2006)
homepage = [http://www.es.com www.es.com]

Evans & Sutherland (nasdaq|ESCC) 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.

History

In the late 1960s, David Evans 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 3D display that we would now call virtual reality. The two met earlier while working on DARPA projects, so Evans recruited him to join the university in 1968. The result was that, during the 1960s and 1970s, the University of Utah was "the" place to be if you were interested in graphics.Fact|date=August 2007

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 might be expected, and the list read 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 a simulator cockpit to daytime light levels. In the 1980s they 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 has grown to become a major arm of E&S commercial activity and, since its launch in July 2003, the company's Digistar 3 system has become the world's fastest selling Digital Theater system installed in upwards of 60 fulldome venues worldwide.

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.

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, IBM, Hewlett Packard, 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.

James Oyler joined the company as CEO in 1994 when David Evans retired. He resigned June 8, 2006, shortly after the sale of the simulation business division to Rockwell Collins. The company continues to expand its Digital Theater division.

As of 2006 Evans & Sutherland joined companies with Spitz, a major company in the production of dome theaters.

Use in Movies and Special Effects

An Evans and Sutherland computer was used in the creation of the Project Genesis simulation sequence in , which was one of the first computer graphic sequences ever used in a movie.

Products

Terminals

* LDS-1 (Line Drawing System-1)
* Picture System
* Picture System II
* PS/390 Picture System/390

Workstations

* VAXstation 8000
* ESV/3
* ESV/10
* ESV/50

Accelerators

* Freedom series

imulation Image Generators

* ESIG-3000
* ESIG-4000

Planetarium Products

* Digistar
* Digistar II
* Digistar 3

upercomputers

* ES-1

External links

* [http://www.es.com/ Evans & Sutherland official website]
* [http://www.rockwellcollins.com/ Rockwell Collins official website]