 |
Robert Alan Saunders | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1938-09-25 |
| Died | 2024-04-17 |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Computer scientist |
| Years active | 1956–1962 (MIT) 1972-1992 (Hewlett Packard) |
| Known for | Spacewar! |
Robert Alan Saunders was an American computer scientist, most famous for his involvement with Spacewar. Saunders joined the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) led by Alan Kotok, Peter Samson, and himself. They then met Marvin Minsky and other influential pioneers in what was then known as Artificial Intelligence. [1]
From 1957–61, Robert Saunders worked with other undergraduates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where they were allowed by Jack Dennis to develop programs for the then TX-0 experimental computer on permanent loan from Lincoln Laboratory. During these years, Saunders and his fellow TRMC members are described as the first true hackers in the book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy. [2] At MIT, Saunders earned bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering. [3] The TMRC group was heavily influenced by professors such as Jack Dennis and Uncle John McCarthy – and by their continued involvement in the student group known as Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC).
While a graduate student, Jack Dennis (former TMRC member) introduced students to the TX-0 on loan to MIT indefinitely from Lincoln Laboratory. In the spring of 1959, McCarthy taught the first course in programming that MIT offered to freshmen. [2]
Outside classes, Saunders, along with fellow TMRC members Alan Kotok, David Gross, Peter Samson, and Robert A. Wagner, all friends from TMRC, reserved time on the TX-0. [4] Dennis enjoyed watching the young hackers work and allowed them to use the TX-0 for various personal projects. [5]
In 1961, DEC donated a PDP-1 to MIT. [6] The PDP-1 had a Type 30 precision CRT display and you could see code run while you were working. Students from TMRC worked as support staff and used this new look at programming as a way to change the way computers were used, working the Lisp programming language and a number of other innovations at the time.
One of these innovations was the first real digital game, called Spacewar! . Written by Saunders, Martin Graetz, Stephen Russell and Wayne Wiitanen in 1961, Spacewar! was inspired by Marvin Minsky's Three Position Display. After urging Russell to start the game for some time, the group had the first version running by early 1962, with some assistance from then DEC employee Alan Kotok. Primarily written by Russell, Spacewar! was one of the earliest interactive computer games. [7]
During this time, Saunders built the first game controllers, thus allowing two people to play against each other without using the control switches on the front of the computer. [8] [9]
After his years at MIT, Saunders spent most of his professional career at Hewlett-Packard, working on computer operating systems. In 1993, he went to work for five years in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, helping to manage the computer system which deals with maintenance of the Royal Saudi Air Force's airplanes.
Saunders devised a proof of Karl Popper's conjecture on refutability, showing that the potential information content of any proposition is equivalent to its refutability. In other words, if there does not exist a means by which a proposition could be shown to be wrong, it can convey no information.
The PDP-1 is the first computer in Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP series and was first produced in 1959. It is famous for being the most important computer in the creation of hacker culture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Bolt, Beranek and Newman and elsewhere. The PDP-1 is the original hardware for playing history's first game on a minicomputer, Steve Russell's Spacewar!
The TX-0, for Transistorized Experimental computer zero, but affectionately referred to as tixo, was an early fully transistorized computer and contained a then-huge 64K of 18-bit words of magnetic-core memory. Construction of the TX-0 began in 1955 and ended in 1956. It was used continually through the 1960s at MIT. The TX-0 incorporated around 3,600 Philco high-frequency surface-barrier transistors, the first transistor suitable for high-speed computers. The TX-0 and its direct descendant, the original PDP-1, were platforms for pioneering computer research and the development of what would later be called computer "hacker" culture. For MIT, this was the first computer to provide a system console which allowed for direct interaction, as opposed to previous computers, which required the use of punched card as a primary interface for programmers debugging their programs. Members of MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club, "the very first hackers at MIT", reveled in the interactivity afforded by the console, and were recruited by Marvin Minsky to work on this and other systems used by Minsky's AI group.
The Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) is a student organization at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Historically, it has been a wellspring of hacker culture and the oldest such hacking group in North America. Formed in 1946, its HO scale layout specializes in the automated operation of model trains.
John McCarthy was an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist. He was one of the founders of the discipline of artificial intelligence. He co-authored the document that coined the term "artificial intelligence" (AI), developed the programming language family Lisp, significantly influenced the design of the language ALGOL, popularized time-sharing, and invented garbage collection.
Richard D. Greenblatt is an American computer programmer. Along with Bill Gosper, he may be considered to have founded the hacker community, and holds a place of distinction in the communities of the programming language Lisp and of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
Stephen Russell, also nicknamed "Slug", is an American computer scientist most famous for creating Spacewar!, well known for being the first widely distributed video game.
Jack Bonnell Dennis is an American computer scientist and Emeritus Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Stewart Nelson is an American mathematician and programmer from The Bronx who co-founded Systems Concepts.
Mac Hack is a computer chess program written by Richard D. Greenblatt. Also known as Mac Hac and The Greenblatt Chess Program, it was developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mac Hack VI was the first chess program to play in human tournament conditions, the first to be granted a chess rating, and the first to win against a person in tournament play. A pseudocode for the program is given in Figure 11.16 of.
Alan Kotok was an American computer scientist known for his work at Digital Equipment Corporation and at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Steven Levy, in his book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, describes Kotok and his classmates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as the first true hackers.
Spacewar! is a space combat video game developed in 1962 by Steve Russell in collaboration with Martin Graetz, Wayne Wiitanen, Bob Saunders, Steve Piner, and others. It was written for the newly installed DEC PDP-1 minicomputer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After its initial creation, Spacewar! was expanded further by other students and employees of universities in the area, including Dan Edwards and Peter Samson. It was also spread to many of the few dozen installations of the PDP-1 computer, making Spacewar! the first known video game to be played at multiple computer installations.
Peter R. Samson is an American computer scientist, best known for creating pioneering computer software for the TX-0 and PDP-1.
Expensive Desk Calculator by Robert A. Wagner is thought to be computing's first interactive calculation program.
Expensive Tape Recorder is a digital audio program written by David Gross while a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Gross developed the idea with Alan Kotok, a fellow member of the Tech Model Railroad Club. The recorder and playback system ran in the late 1950s or early 1960s on MIT's TX-0 computer on loan from Lincoln Laboratory.
Harmony Compiler was written by Peter Samson at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The compiler was designed to encode music for the PDP-1 and built on an earlier program Samson wrote for the TX-0 computer.
Kotok-McCarthy also known as A Chess Playing Program for the IBM 7090 Computer was the first computer program to play chess convincingly. It is also remembered because it played in and lost the first chess match between two computer programs. A pseudocode of the program is in Figure 11.15 of.
T-Square is an early drafting program written by Peter Samson assisted by Alan Kotok and possibly Robert A. Saunders while they were students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and members of the Tech Model Railroad Club.
The history of video games spans a period of time between the invention of the first electronic games and today, covering many inventions and developments. Video gaming reached mainstream popularity in the 1970s and 1980s, when arcade video games, gaming consoles and home computer games were introduced to the general public. Since then, video gaming has become a popular form of entertainment and a part of modern culture in most parts of the world. The early history of video games, therefore, covers the period of time between the first interactive electronic game with an electronic display in 1947, the first true video games in the early 1950s, and the rise of early arcade video games in the 1970s. During this time there was a wide range of devices and inventions corresponding with large advances in computing technology, and the actual first video game is dependent on the definition of "video game" used.
The AI Memos are a series of influential memorandums and technical reports published by the MIT AI Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States. They cover Artificial Intelligence, a field of computer science.
The Jargon File is a glossary and usage dictionary of slang used by computer programmers. The original Jargon File was a collection of terms from technical cultures such as the MIT AI Lab, the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) and others of the old ARPANET AI/LISP/PDP-10 communities, including Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), Carnegie Mellon University, and Worcester Polytechnic Institute. It was published in paperback form in 1983 as The Hacker's Dictionary, revised in 1991 as The New Hacker's Dictionary.
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