The founder of NYIT, entrepreneur and eccentric millionaire Dr. Alexander Schure, had a long and ardent interest in animation. He was a great admirer of Walt Disney and dreamed of making animated features like those from the golden age of theatrical animation. He had already created a traditional animation facility at NYIT. After visiting the University of Utah and seeing the potential of the computer technology in the form of the computer drawing program Sketchpad created by Ivan Sutherland, he told his people to pore over the Utah research center and get him one of everything they had. He then established the NYIT Computer Graphics Lab, buying state-of-the-art equipment and hiring major researchers from throughout the computer graphics field.