Richard Greenblatt (programmer)
| Richard D. Greenblatt | |
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Greenblatt in 2009
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| Born | December 25, 1944 |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | MIT |
| Occupation | Programmer |
Richard D. Greenblatt (born December 25, 1944) 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 Lisp and the MIT AI Lab communities.
Greenblatt was born in Portland, Oregon on December 25, 1944. His family moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania when he was a child. He later moved to Columbia, Missouri with his mother and sister when his parents divorced.
Greenblatt enrolled in MIT in the fall of 1962, and 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 for the IBM 709 series machines, to automate the tedious business of writing the intricate timetables for the Railroad Club's vast model train layout. Greenblatt felt compelled to implement a Fortran compiler for the PDP-1, which did not have one at the time. There was no computer time available to debug the compiler, or even to type it into the computer. Years later, elements of this compiler (combined with some ideas from fellow TMRC member Steven Piner, the author of a very early PDP-4 Fortran compiler while working for Digital Equipment Corporation) were typed in and "showed signs of life". However, the perceived need for a Fortran compiler had evaporated by then, so the compiler was not pursued further. This and other experiences at TMRC, especially the influence of Alan Kotok, who worked at DEC and was the junior partner of the design team for the PDP-6 computer, led Greenblatt to the AI Lab, where he proceeded to become a "hacker's hacker" noted for his programming acumen as described in Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, and as acknowledged by Gerald Jay Sussman and Harold Abelson when they said they were fortunate to have been apprentice programmers at the feet of Bill Gosper and Richard Greenblatt
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