Richard D. Greenblatt is an American programmer. Along with Bill Gosper, he may be considered to have founded the hacker community, and holds pride of place in the Lisp and the MIT AI Lab communities. R. William Gosper, Jr. ... A hacker is a person who creates and modifies computer software and computer hardware, including computer programming, administration, and security-related items. ... Lisp is a family of computer programming languages with a long history and a distinctive fully-parenthesized syntax. ... ...

Becoming a hacker

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 Addams Associates firm until the AI Lab re-hired him. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, is a private research university located in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. MIT is one of the worlds leading research institutions in science and technology. ... The Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC), also known as The Midnight Requisitioning Committee a student organization at MIT, is one of the most famous model railroad clubs in the world. ... Fortran (also FORTRAN) is a general-purpose[1], procedural[2], imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing. ... The MIT Artificial intelligence Laboratory was an interdisciplinary research entity at MIT founded in 1959, and one of the most influential and accomplished in the field. ... Steven Levy is an American journalist who has written several books on computers, technology, cryptography, the Internet, cyber security and privacy. ... Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (ISBN 0385191952) is a book by Steven Levy about the hacker culture. ...

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. MacLisp is a dialect of the Lisp programming language. ... The PDP-6 (Programmed Data Processor-6) was a computer model developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1963. ... MacHack ist a chess program written in the 1960s by MIT student Richard Greenblatt. ... Hubert Dreyfus (born 1929) is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. ... 1990s Pressure-sensory Chess Computer with LCD screen The idea of creating a chess-playing machine dates back to the eighteenth century. ... Tom Knight is a senior research scientist in the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the MIT EECS department. ... Stewart Nelson, is an American mathematician and programmer from the Bronx who co-founded Systems Concepts. ... ITS, the Incompatible Timesharing System, was an early, revolutionary, and influential MIT time-sharing operating system; it was developed principally by the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, with some help from Project MAC. ITS development was initiated in the late 1960s by those (the majority of the MIT AI Lab... Alternate uses: see Timesharing Time-sharing is an approach to interactive computing in which a single computer is used to provide apparently simultaneous interactive general-purpose computing to multiple users by sharing processor time. ... The PDP-6 (Programmed Data Processor-6) was a computer model developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1963. ... The PDP-10 was a computer manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) from the late 1960s on; the name stands for Programmed Data Processor model 10. It was the machine that made time-sharing common; it looms large in hacker folklore because of its adoption in the 1970s by many... Mapúa Institute of Technology (MIT, MapúaTech or simply Mapúa) is a private, non-sectarian, Filipino tertiary institute located in Intramuros, Manila. ...

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. The original Lisp machine built by Greenblatt and Knight Lisp machines were general-purpose computers designed (usually through hardware support) to efficiently run Lisp as their main software language. ... Tom Knight is a senior research scientist in the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the MIT EECS department. ... Lisp machines were general purpose computers designed (often with hardware support) to efficiently run Lisp as their main language. ... Lisp machines were general purpose computers designed (often with hardware support) to efficiently run Lisp as their main language. ...

External links

• A speech from RMS in which he gives some background about Greenblatt