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Ricky Greenblatt’s father takes him to the Memorial Student Union at the University of Missouri, which ultimately changed his life. He met a good friend, Lester, who introduced him to Mr. Houghton where he built all sorts of projects from amplifiers to modulators to vacuum tubes.
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His first semester he was able to get acquainted with the Model Railroad Club, to which he felt inspired to write the first FORTRAN for the PDP-1.
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Greenblatt chooses MIT which he enters in the fall of 1962.
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Sophomore year, Greenblatt flunked out of the MIT student body as he became more focused on hacking for the PDP-1 than going to classes and getting a degree.
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One of the first projects Greenblatt worked on with the PDP-6 was the LISP compiler that allowed the machine to run the latest version of John McCarthy’s AI language.
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Greenblatt developed the MacHack VI program for the DEC PDP-6. In 1967 it became the first computer to be able to play against a person in chess.
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Greenblatt invites Dreyfus to play against the MacHack VI; Dreyfus loses against the MacHack VI.
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Greenblatt started the MIT Lisp project, quickly joining the project were other MIT hackers David Moon, Richard Stallman and others. The MIT Lisp project’s language features fitted with the PDP-10 MacLisp, with that the projects cross fertilized.
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Bobby Fischer, unbeaten chess champion, plays three games against MacHack VI. Fischer ends up winning.
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Greenblatt founded LISP Machine Inc, which competes alongside Symbolics, a similar company founded by his former MIT colleagues.
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LISP Machine Inc, goes bankrupt
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Richard Greenblatt alongside Tom Knight and Stewart Nelson co-wrote the Incompatible Timesharing System for the PDP-6 and 10 that was used at MIT.
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Later on, him and Tom Knight became the main leaders of the MIT Lisp machine
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The former Lisp Machine became the Gigamos System Inc. with about 45 workers and Richard Greenblatt being the new president.
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Both Greenblatt and Gosper are considered the “founding fathers,” of the hacker community.