University of Utah School of Computing

The School of Computing is a school within the College of Engineering at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah. The school offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in computer science. The school has major research funding that supports initiatives in:

The School of Computing has made important contributions to computer graphics and computer animation. These contributions include:

Computing research at the University of Utah started in 1965 when former university president James Fletcher recruited Berkeley professor David C. Evans to return to his home state to establish a computer science division within the electrical engineering department. Evans graduated from the University of Utah in 1953 with a Ph.D. in physics. Before returning to Utah, Evans developed computing systems, first at Bendix as project manager of the commercially successful G-15 computer and follow-on G-20 (1955-1962). While at Berkeley from 1962-1965, Evans and G-15 architect Harry Huskey initiated Project Genie, which led to innovations such as the Scientific Data Systems 940 time-sharing operating system.

Upon his return to the University of Utah, Evans wanted to cultivate a culture of creativity. He hired faculty with diverse experiences and backgrounds and encouraged interactive use of computing for a variety of creative pursuits.

Evans was immediately awarded a large ARPA grant from Robert William Taylor, then Director of the ARPA IPTO office, to create a center of excellence in computer graphics. 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. Leveraging the multimillion-dollar funding from ARPA, Evans was able to harness the absolute state-of-the-art in equipment needed to advance this area.

The University of Utah was one of the original four nodes of ARPANET, the world's first packet-switching computer network and embryo of the current worldwide Internet. 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.

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