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 at MIT 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 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 (previous development work on the language had focused on compiling the language). He invented the continuation to solve a double recursion problem for one of the users of his Lisp implementation.
Steve Russell is an alumn of Dartmouth College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Famous quotes containing the words steve and/or russell:
“Who is your user, program?”
—Steve Lisberger, U.S. screenwriter, and Steve Lisberger. Dumont (Barnard Hughes)
“Sincerity is impossible, unless it pervade the whole being, and the pretence of it saps the very foundation of character.”
—James Russell Lowell (1819–1891)