Talk:Steve Russell (computer scientist)

First v Earliest video game

My informed understanding based on primary sources is that Spacewar! really was the first computer video game. I don't understand why this article was weakened by ending the introductory paragraph with "Spaceware!, one of the earliest video games." Can someone please settle this issue and correct the language to be less "wishy washy," if indeed my understanding is undisputed? --Tim McNerney (talk) 23:04, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

Untitled

what about his basic personal information such as date of birth, and the city and state that he was born in?

- —Preceding unsigned comment added by Urbanchampion (talk • contribs) 17:52, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

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

—

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)

photo of Steve in front of a PDP-1, Spacewar running on PDP-1 - both photos taken by me licensed under CC-BY if anyone wants to use them in the article. --Joi 13:25, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

Done. Uploaded to the commons and linked here. Best wishes. -Susanlesch 00:22, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks! -- Joi 05:19, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

Mr Russell- If you dont have any degrees, what did you study in university? And where did you learn to program computers?

regardless of any degrees, money or any other stupid piece of paper, if it wasn't for the man, Lisp may have been a very different and perhaps obscure programming language (m-expressions, anyone?). And would Magnavox, Atari, Taito, Namco, Nintendo and other videogame pioneers existed? Many of the minds behind these companies have had prior exposure to the PDP-10 game... I say Mr. Russell's contributions to the influential Lisp language and videogames are much more valuable than any degree that the market currently pumps out... 189.27.10.139 18:20, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

to all- I think under the "known for" title that Steve is known for being the first implenter of Lisp as well as for spacewar. Brad Cantrell 01:46 14 July 2007

Reference for continuations in Lisp interpreter?

Does anyone have a reference for the statement in the article that Steve Russell implemented continuations in an early Lisp interpreter? Kleg 20:00, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

Broken Link

Just wanted to point out: The first external link (Visual display...) that directs to http://lcs.www.media.mit.edu/groups/el/projects/spacewar/ seems to be broken. It gives me a 404.

Jxw13 02:18, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

WikiProject class rating

This article was automatically assessed because at least one WikiProject had rated the article as stub, and the rating on other projects was brought up to Stub class. BetacommandBot 11:05, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

The terminal

The article has a photograph of a terminal playing Spacewar; I can see three men reflected in it. Is Steve Russell the man in the middle? The figure seems to have the same clothes and hair as the man in the other photograph. -Ashley Pomeroy (talk) 16:51, 25 December 2009 (UTC)