Richard Greenblatt

Richard D. Greenblatt, born on 25 December 1944 in Portland, Oregon, is an American computer programmer who, along with Bill Gosper, may be considered a founder of the hacker community. He enrolled at MIT in the fall of 1962, found his way to the Tech Model Railroad Club and then to the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where he became known as a hacker's hacker. He left MIT after failing as a junior and worked at a firm until the AI Lab hired him about six months later. He was the main implementor of Maclisp on the PDP-6, wrote Mac Hack, the first computer program to play tournament-level chess and the first to compete in a human chess tournament, and with Tom Knight and Stewart Nelson co-wrote the Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS). In 1979 he and Tom Knight were the main designers of the MIT Lisp machine, and he founded Lisp Machines, Inc., later renamed Gigamos Systems.