Inventor's name: Ivan Sutherland

Date of birth: Born in 1938 in Hastings, Nebraska.

Date of death: Still Living

Invention: Sketch Pad

Today [December, 2001], Dr. Sutherland is Vice President and Fellow at Sun Micro Systems. He also led the department of computer science at the California Institute of Technology. He went to Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) on a full scholarship, and earned his B.S. in electrical engineering in 1959. Working under computing pioneer Claude Shannon at MIT, Sutherland created a computer program called Sketchpad, which made it possible to create graphic images directly on a display screen by using a hand-held object such as a light pen.