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The wealthy Rockefeller family of New York sat on the board of the Utah based computer graphics company, Evans and Sutherland.

David Evans and Ivan Sutherland, professors in the Computer Science Department at the University of Utah, had started the company in 1968 to produce hardware that could support their labs' research. Sutherland had achieved fame in 1962 by creating Sketchpad, a computer drawing system that was the first graphical user interface.

The CS department was engaged in a variety of disciplines including computer graphics, virtual reality, real-time hardware and printer languages. The student roster eventually grew to include Edwin (Ed) Catmull, Malcolm Blanchard, Jim Clark, Alan Kay, Jim Blinn, Henri Gouraud, John Warnock and Alan Ashton.

Blanchard recalls his journey to Utah:

In my senior year at UCSC, Dr. Ken Knowlton took a sabbatical from Bells Labs to teach a computer graphics class at Santa Cruz. This was the first I had heard of CG and immediately knew this is what I wanted to do with my career.

I’m a visually oriented person and computer graphics was a perfect match. Dr. Knowlton was aware of the work going on at Utah and showed us some of the shaded-graphic images that had been produced by Jim Clark, Martin Newell and others.These were amazing images to me after only having pen plotters and text printers to make graphics.

I applied, was accepted, and was so fortunate to join that group of professors and students. For my master’s project I designed and built a piece of equipment that Jim Clark needed for his thesis.

Catmull told Karen Paik for To Infinity and Beyond!: The Story of Pixar Animation Studios:

We had ARPA funding, and it was an exciting field so we just went nuts.

Blanchard told Paik:

Ivan used to say he loved grad students because they didn't know what was impossible

Catmull told Pat Hanrahan for ACM:

We were expected to create original work. We were at the frontier, and our job was to expand it. They basically said, "You can consult with us every once in a while, and we'll check in with you, but we're off running this company."