Steve "Slug" Russell is a programmer and computer scientist most famous for creating Spacewar!, one of the earliest videogames, in 1961 with the fellow members of the Tech Model Railroad Club

Tech Model Railroad Club

The Tech Model Railroad Club is a student organization at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , and one of the most celebrated model railroad clubs in the world, because of its historic role as a wellspring of hacker culture...

 at MIT working on a DEC

Digital Equipment Corporation

Digital Equipment Corporation was a major American company in the computer industry and a leading vendor of computer systems, software and peripherals from the 1960s to the 1990s...

 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

IBM 704

The IBM 704, the first mass-produced computer with floating point arithmetic hardware, was introduced by IBM in 1954. The 704 was significantly improved over the IBM 701 in terms of architecture as well as implementations which were not compatible with its predecessor.Changes from the 701 included...

. It was Russell who realized that the concept of universal functions 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

Interpreter (computing)

In computer science, an interpreter normally means a computer program that executes, i.e. performs, instructions written in a programming language...

 (previous development work on the language had focused on compiling

Compiler

A compiler is a computer program that transforms source code written in a programming language into another computer language...

 the language). He invented the continuation

Continuation

In computer science and programming, a continuation is an abstract representation of the control state of a computer program. A continuation reifies the program control state, i.e...

 to solve a double recursion problem for one of the users of his Lisp implementation.

Steve Russell is an alum of Dartmouth College

Dartmouth College

Dartmouth College is a private, Ivy League university in Hanover, New Hampshire, United States. The institution comprises a liberal arts college, Dartmouth Medical School, Thayer School of Engineering, and the Tuck School of Business, as well as 19 graduate programs in the arts and sciences...

 and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...

.

External links

• The Dot Eaters entry on Russell and the development of Spacewar

See also

• First video game
  First video game
  There are numerous debates over who created the first video game, with the answer depending largely on how video games are defined. The evolution of video games represents a tangled web of several different industries, including scientific, computer, arcade, and consumer electronics.The "video" in...