The company was founded in 1968 by David C. Evans and Ivan Sutherland, professors in the Computer Science Department at the University of Utah.

Most of the employees were active or former students, and included Jim Clark, who started Silicon Graphics, Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar, and John Warnock, founder of Adobe.

The project, called CAORF (Computer Aided Operations Research Facility), was built for the US Maritime Academy.

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.

The Freedom Series graphics engine was developed to work with Sun Microsystems, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and DEC workstations.

[citation needed] 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.

Technicians at Abel built computer-controlled 35mm cameras which interfaced with the PS2 and recorded the images directly from the CRT screen.

[12] Initially, Robert Abel and his staff had found ways to use an Evans & Sutherland flight simulator to present a simple wireframe version of what was to be photographed later by a motion-control camera.

[13] 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.