Steve Russell

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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 heavily modified 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.

He also wrote the first two implementations of Lisp for the IBM 704 after having a class about the (until then) theoretical language. 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). To simplify implementation, he developed the S-expression notation, creating the first homoiconic language in the process. He invented the continuation to solve a problem for one of the users of his Lisp implementation.

He holds Bachelor of Science, Master of Science, and Engineer degrees in EECS from MIT.

At one time Steve worked for a company founded by Nolan Bushnell after Atari.

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

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