Over the years it played a crucial role in inspiring the creators of companies like Apple and Atari, said Henry Lowood, the curator of Stanford University's collections on the history of science and technology. Perhaps most significantly, Spacewar demonstrated that sheer fun would become a driving force underlying progress in computing technology. It was an early hint that a powerful new entertainment medium was on the horizon, one that would ultimately bond Silicon Valley to Hollywood. Russell, it was the world's first video game. The duel was called Spacewar.ĭesigned by a small group of pioneering computer programmers led by Mr. Two tiny spaceships were locked in mortal combat as they swung around a simulated sun. To be precise, that time was 40 years ago this month, with the result played out on a computer screen at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There was a time, he recalls thinking, when a cutting-edge computer-generated fantasy could be conceived, written, tested and packaged for distribution in a few months, just through the part-time efforts of a small group of friends. STEVE RUSSELL sat in a darkened movie theater recently watching the army of credits roll by after a computer-animated Hollywood blockbuster. In the fall of 1968, he mentored Bill Gates and Paul Allen on the use of the DEC PDP-10 mainframe, while they were part of the programming group of Lakeside School (Seattle). He later served as an executive of Computer Center Corporation (nicknamed C-Cubed), a small time-sharing company in Washington (state). Spacewar! is widely considered to be the first digital video game and served as a foundation for the entire video game industry. In 1962, Russell created and designed Spacewar!, with the fellow members of the Tech Model Railroad Club at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), working on a Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-1 minicomputer. He invented the continuation to solve a double recursion problem for one of the users of his Lisp implementation. ![]() By implementing the Lisp universal evaluator in a lower-level language, it became possible to create the Lisp interpreter prior development work on the language had focused on compiling the language. It was Russell who realized that the concept of universal functions could be applied to the language. Russell wrote the first two implementations of the programming language Lisp for the IBM 704 mainframe computer. Russell attended Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire from 1954 to 1958.
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