Talk:Steve Russell

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edited the intro a little to reflect that there may have been prior games such as the tennis for two game

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I do have a problem with this page. The Steve Russell who wrote the first two Lisp interpreters and Spacewar! does not have any degrees, let alone from MIT. I was educated at Dartmouth from 1954 to 1958.

However, as I understand the rules, I should not change the article, because I am an interested party (Steve Russell of the article). I cannot be neutral, and my source is "Because I say so!", which is does not meet the criteria for a suitable source.

I don't have a suitable reference for these facts, and I could be an imposter.

I look forward with interest to suggestions about the proper way of dealing with this.

Additional items in the article that disagree with my memory:

The PDP-1 that Spacewar! was developed on had not been modified. It was as close to a standard PDP-1 as it could be. It had 4 Kwords of memory and a type 30 display.

I did not take a class in the theoretical language Lisp nor did am I responsible for s-expressions. I was an employee of the MIT Artificial Intelligence project. I was working for John McCarthy, who developed the "theoretical" lisp m-experssions and also the computer readable version "s-expressions". There was list reader and printer for S-expressions before John developed the "universal function". I had been hand-compiling Lisp functions for a few months and observed that the "universal function" in m-expressions could be hand compiled into something executable. John thought this would be a good idea, so I did it. Jim Slagle then presented a collection of functions to do formal integration, and I recognized that it had a double recursion that couldn't be handled by the first Lisp interpreter. I added the "function-funarg hack" to fix this problem. It was condisered a rather disreputable programming trick at the time because it worked for an interpreter, but could not be easily compiled.

As I have never taken a computer science class, and have published no significant papers in the field, I think that calling me a "computer scientist" is not justified.

CompGamePioneer 00:15, 11 October 2006 (UTC)