- Steve Russell
Infobox_Scientist
name = Stephen Russell
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birth_date = 1937
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field =computer science
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alma_mater =Dartmouth College
known_for =Spacewar!
spouse =Steve "Slug" Russell is a programmer and computer scientist most famous for creating
Spacewar! , one of the earliestvideogame s, in1961 with the fellow members of theTech Model Railroad Club atMIT working on a DEC Digital PDP-1. While there is some debate over priority regarding the concept of computer-based games in general, Spacewar! was unquestionably the first to gain widespread recognition, and is generally recognized as the first of the "shoot-'em' up" genre.Steve Russell wrote the first two implementations of Lisp for the
IBM 704 . It was Russell who realized that the concept ofuniversal function s could be applied to the language; by implementing the Lisp universal evaluator in a lower-level language, it became possible to create the Lisp interpreter (previous development work on the language had focused on compiling the language). He invented thecontinuation to solve a double recursion problem for one of the users of his Lisp implementation.Steve Russell was educated at
Dartmouth College from 1954 to 1958.Steve Russell was never an employee of
Atari , though he did work for a later company founded byNolan Bushnell .Steve has stated that it is unclear how his nickname "Slug" came about.
External links
* [http://www.thedoteaters.com/stage1.php The Dot Eaters entry] on Russell and the development of Spacewar
* [http://spacewar.oversigma.com/ Java emulation of PDP-1 running Spacewar]See also
*
First Video Game
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