Steve Russell (computer scientist)

For other people named Steve Russell, see Steve Russell (disambiguation).

Steve Russell
Born	Stephen Russell 1937 (age 87–88)
Other names	Slug
Residence	U.S.
Fields	Computer science
Alma mater	Dartmouth College
Known for	Spacewar!, Lisp

Spacewar! on the Computer History Museum's PDP-1, 2007

Steve "Slug" Russell (born 1937) is an American computer scientist most famous for creating Spacewar!, one of the earliest video games.

Biography

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.

In 1961, Russell created and designed Spacewar!, with the fellow members of the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT, working on a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-1 minicomputer. Spacewar! is widely considered to be the first digital video game and served as a foundation for the entire video game industry.

See also

• First video game