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Steve Russell Year of Birth
Within the year 1937, Stephen Rundlett Russell would be born in Hartford, Connecticut. -
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A Love for Trains and Electronics
As Steve grew up, he would visit his uncle who had a room dedicated to trains. Steve would become fascinated and get his own Lionel model train the next Christmas. He would learn the basics of electronics through his love for trains. -
A Visit to Harvard
Steve would visit his uncle, George Washington Pierce, a Harvard professor who worked with ultrasonics and acoustics. George would take Steve to see the Mark I, where they would meet Howard Aiken, who would show them the error detection. Steve was extremely impressed by the machine and the fact that it was electromechanical. This sparked his love for electronics more and his fascination with computers. -
Moving to the West Coast
Steve and his family would move to Mount Vernon to live on his grandfather's farm. Steve would then go to high school at Mount Vernon High School and soon head out to Dartmouth. -
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The Dartmouth Experience
Steve Russell would graduate high school and leave for Dartmouth, majoring in math. While he was attending, he would work at a radio station, gaining the nickname "Slug" from his fellow Juniors and Seniors. He would soon meet John McCarthy, who was professor at Dartmouth for a year before leaving to MIT. Contrary to belief, Steve admitted in an interview that he never graduated Dartmouth because he never turned in his senior thesis. -
Connections with John McCarthy
During his college career, Steve would get a student assistantship with the math department and was the printer for the first edition of Kemeny and Kurtz Introduction into Finite Mathematics. McCarthy arranged to use the SNARC and Steve was able restore it and get some of the units to work. McCarthy was impressed by his mechanical work and had Steve down as his MIT student assistant. Even though Steve never graduated, John still offered him a job at MIT to do programming with him. -
Working for MIT
As he began his work at MIT, Steve would work together with McCarthy on LISP (List Processing), a programming language used to manipulate data strings. He would then join the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT, working specifically with relays, wires, circuits and crossbars. During September, TMRC would come across the PDP-1, a computer that was donated to MIT. -
SpaceWar! in the Making
As the PDP-1 arrived, Steve and some of his colleagues began to work on SpaceWar!. Steve would get influence from Minsky after Minsky learned how to code circles and put them on the screen. Over the month of December, Steve would find the algorithms to create the turns and speed settings for the space ships. -
SpaceWar! and its presentation
After Steve finished the codes for the ships, a few members of TMRC helped Steve complete his work. They would help create constellation graphics, better run times, gravity pull, escape mechanics, and missile projectiles. In May of 1962, the group presented their project at MIT's open house by feeding 27 pages of the PDP-1 assembly language to set it up and play it on the screen. Little did Steve and his team know, SpaceWar! would create a new genre of multimedia. -
Steve Russell and his Hacker Ethic
After the game was presented, the DEC was so impressed, that they uploaded the game to every PDP-1 model. Steve Russell didn't even know about the DEC uploading the code to every computer until later. Russell understood that they would use the code and was okay with it. The code was also used before the computer was shipped out to their new owners, it was a way to test the core memory of the PDP-1 to see if it stell functioned after shipping.
https://www.masswerk.at/spacewar/ -
SpaceWar! Modifications
As SpaceWar! began to spread to different universities, the code of the game began to get debug and adapt better versions that existed to become more playable. Different versions of the game existed and players love the different parameters offered to them. -
Moving to Stanford
After the success of SpaceWar!, the code and game quickly followed Steve to Stanford when the school ordered a PDP-1 computer themselves. When the system arrived, Steve helped with a timeshare system that would allow up to 12 users play the game at once! The game did not have great performance since there were many games running at once, but it was fascinating to see it work. -
Intergalactic SpaceWar! Olympics
Years later, SpaceWar! and the timesharing system that interacted with it would see the day of light again. Stanford used the PDP-10 to play the game and created a tournament for the public! 24 players participated in the five man free for all and teams. Brian Baumgart would win the free for all, while Slim Tovar and Robert E. Mass would win the Teams. This tournament is considered the first video game tournament in history. An article was written about the event from Rolling Stone. -
SpaceWar! on Atari
In 1978, Atari would take the game and recreate its own version for the console. Nolan Bushnell would interact with the game in the 1960s, which influence him to create Computer Space (1971) and create the company Atari. They would soon take the beloved game and put it out to the public through the Atari Console. -
Steve Russell Interview
After the video game industry has grown and developed into what it is known for, Christopher Weaver from the Smithsonian Institution would conduct an interview with Steve and get many details on Spacewar!, his history with programming from a young age, and looking back to see how far SpaceWar! has come along. Steve would encourage younger developers to not be afraid to take risk and start of simple before getting into the hard code. -
Steve, The Team, and SpaceWar! Going Down in the History Books
The Academy of Interactive Arts and Science would give Steve and his team the Pioneers Award for the creation of SpaceWar! and the contribution the game has as the start of a new multimedia revolution.
https://www.interactive.org/news/112018_spacewar_pioneer.asp