Steve Russell

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This article is about the computer scientist. For the con artist, see Steven Jay Russell.

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 was educated at Dartmouth College from 1954 to 1958.

Steve Russell was not ever an employee of Atari, though he did work for a later company founded by Nolan Bushnell. He currently works for Nohau.

Steve has stated that it is unclear how his nickname "Slug" came about.