Richard Greenblatt (programmer)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

See Richard Greenblatt for other people of the same name.

Richard D. Greenblatt is an American programmer. Along with Bill Gosper, he may be considered to have founded the hacker community, and holds a place of pride in the Lisp and the MIT AI Lab communities.

Greenblatt enrolled in MIT in the fall of 1962, but around his second term as an undergraduate student, he found his way to MIT's famous Tech Model Railroad Club. At that time, Peter Samson had written a program in Fortran to automate the tedious business of writing the intricate timetables for the Railroad Club's vast model train layout; for some reason, Greenblatt felt compelled to re-implement the program on the PDP-1. This feat of necessity led him to the AI Lab, where he proceeded to become a "hacker's hacker" notorious as much for his programming acumen as his lack of personal hygiene, as Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution dubbed him. Indeed, he spent so much time programming the PDP machines there he failed out of MIT as a sophomore and had to take a job at the Charles Adams Associates firm until the AI Lab re-hired him.

He was the main implementor of Maclisp on the PDP-6. He wrote MacHack, in response to the claim by AI sceptic Hubert Dreyfus that computers would not be able to play chess. Dreyfus was beaten by the program, marking the beginning of computer chess. He also wrote, with Tom Knight and Stewart Nelson, the Incompatible Timesharing System, a highly influential timesharing operating system for the PDP-6 and PDP-10 used at MIT.

Later, he was the main designer of the MIT Lisp machine along with Tom Knight. He founded Lisp Machines, Inc. (which later became Gigamos Systems), according to his vision of an ideal hacker-friendly computer company, as opposed to the more commercial ideals of Symbolics.

Persondata
NAME Greenblatt, Richard D.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Greenblatt, Richard
SHORT DESCRIPTION American programmer
DATE OF BIRTH
PLACE OF BIRTH
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH
Advanced Search
Included Web Search Engines


Safe Search

close

Top Matching Results

Occasionally Search.com will highlight specialized results that are based on the context of your query. Examples of specialized results include specific links to news, images, or video.

Top Matching Results may highlight information from other Search.com pages, content from the CNET Network of sites, or third party content. The listings are based purely on relevance. Search.com does not receive payment for listings in this section but our partners that provide this data may get paid for listing these products.

Sponsored Links

This section contains paid listings which have been purchased by companies that want to have their sites appear for specific search terms and related content. These listings are administered, sorted and maintained by a third party and are not endorsed by Search.com.

Search Results

Search.com sends your search query to several search engines at one time and integrates the results into one list which has been sorted by relevance using Search.com's proprietary algorithm. You can customize the list of search engines included in your metasearch from the preferences.

The search engines that are used in your metasearch may allow companies to pay to have their Web sites included within the results. To view the Paid Inclusion policy for a specific search engine, please visit their Web site. Search.com does not accept payment or share revenue with any search engine partner for listings in this section.