University of Utah School of Computing
Evans believed that small, interactive computers should be developed to augment human creativity, and he planned to use the ARPA award to pursue this line of research.
[3] In late 1969, the U's computer graphics department was linked into the node at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California to complete the initial four-node network.
Evans and graduate student Steve Carr came from Berkeley to lead early efforts in ARPANET research at University of Utah.
Carr participated in the first Network Working Group meeting in 1968, chaired by Elmer Shapiro from SRI, and also attended by Steve Crocker, Jeff Rulifson, and Ron Stoughton.
The architecture of the ARPANET and the use of a separate Interface Message Processor (IMP) was hatched in 1967 by Wesley A. Clark of Washington University while in a rental car with Taylor and Evans.
From MIT, they recruited engineering and signal/image processing talent, including faculty Thomas Stockham and Chuck Seitz, and Ph.D. students Donald Oestreicher and Alan L. Davis.
From Ecole Polytechnique and other universities in France, they attracted the mathematical talent of students Robert Mahl, Henri Gouraud, Patrick Baudelaire, and Bui Tuong Phong.
During the era of Evans and Sutherland, graduates of the Utah program made seminal contributions to rendering, shading, animation, visualization and virtual reality (notably the work of John Warnock in 1969, Henri Gouraud in 1971, Donald Vickers in 1972, Phong in 1973, Ed Catmull and Fred Parke in 1974, Henry Fuchs and Martin Newell in 1975, Frank Crow in 1976, Jim Blinn in 1978, Jim Kajiya in 1979, and many others).
Additional graphics faculty hired during this time included computer artist Ron Resch (1970-1979) and Rich Riesenfeld, an expert in computer-aided geometric design (1972–present).
The points and polygons were rendered using hardware developed by 1970 Utah Ph.D. Gary Watkins to imprint shaded images onto a direct film recorder.
The research built on Riesenfeld and Cohen's prior work on B-splines, NURBs and the Oslo-algorithm for geometric and shaded rendering computations.
At Utah, Kay learned to think of computers as dynamic, interactive personal devices to support creative thought - the founding principle of his work.
Kay's Ph.D. thesis (1969) described the design of the FLEX machine, a flexible, extensible programming language developed in collaboration with Ed Cheadle.
In January 1992, students Michael Moore and Richard Nash developed the first internet chess server and hosted it at lark.utah.edu for people to access through telnet.
[8] Given its long history and affiliation with the development of computer science as a field, the School has been home to a number of respected scientists, entrepreneurs, and educators.
