The computer graphics industry got started at the university of Utah

Jim Clark was a native of the South (Texas) and went to night school at Tulane in New Orleans before he went to Utah for graduate school.

Alumnus. We had multiple times when one of Nolan’s friends came to class and pretty much literally dumped a bunch of Atari hardware on the front table.

We got to play with stuff and hear some great stories. The U of Utah is a great place, if you like snow, physics, computers and steep inclines. And haha it even has a surprising cultural scene (there is beer.)

One of my mentors there invented that magnetic ink on checks. That was a mind-blower too!

Evans and Sutherland also developed CDRS (Conceptual Design and Rendering System) which was later bought by PTC and developed into ISDX. This is a 3D CAD tool for high quality surfacing used by industrial designers and surfacing experts to develop exteriors for automotive and consumer products. It was originally written in Lisp.

Unlike many other CAD tools, especially for its time, it described the relation between surfaces as a bunch of rules. So surfaces 'A' and 'B' could influence 'C', and then the user change their mind and decide that 'C' should drive 'A' and 'B' instead. Unlike other parametric tools which would come later, you didn't set this up by reordering a bunch of features, you just changed the connection icons between the surfaces. It was up to CDRS to figure out what order to solve the constraints and build the surfaces.

The University of Utah was also the fourth node of ARPANET, the predecessor of the internet - https://www.lib.utah.edu/digital-scholarship/arpanet/

On a personal note, this is also part of why I exist at all.

My father came from England very young, worked his way through agriculture jobs in California, and somehow found himself with a job offer at the u of u as an electron microscopist. Met my mom there. Details are fuzzy and not retrievable from the dead. For some reason this job required him early access to the „internet“ in the 80s.

In 1994, we were, as I was told at the time, one of the first families to “have internet” in Utah. We had a dial up connection that lasted 15 minutes before needing to reconnect. As anyone my age remembers, that was about as long as it took to load one webpage with one image.

It was a massive influence on me and my neighborhood friends in countless ways and I’m eternally grateful for what came of it.

Peter Shirley is a University of Utah guy right? His Ray Tracing in One Weekend series is brilliant