> the unlikely mecca of the field, the University of Utah<p>The story is that David C. Evans was made head of Utah's CS department in 1966, having worked on Berkeley's timesharing research, Project Genie, and having been born in Salt Lake City. He applied for graphics funding from the Arpa-backed Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) which funded practically all the major computing leaps of the 1960s including the Arpanet, chasing the vision of JCR Licklider's "man-computer symbiosis". Not only did the IPTO stump funds, but they decided to make Utah an IPTO centre of excellence in graphics. Furthermore, in 1968 they sent down Ivan Sutherland, a former IPTO director who invented the line drawing program Sketchpad for his PhD under the supervision of Claude Shannon, down to Utah to join Evans. Sutherland accredited Evans with being "The man who figured out the basic techniques that made modern computer graphics possible".<p>So bear in mind that Alvy Ray Smith and thereby Pixar stood very much on the shoulders of giants. And that the foundations of computer graphics were paved by a serious amount of public spending.