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Peter Samson was born 1941 in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. -
Living only 30 minutes away, in the fall of 1958, Peter Samson heads to MIT. -
In just his first week at MIT, Samson joins the Tech Model Railroad Club. -
S&P (signals and power subcommittee) was a group in TMRC that focused on the underlay of the club. There Samson called himself a hacker and dedicated a poem to his other fellow hackers. -
In June of 1959 Samson wrote the first edition of the TMRC Dictionary, and a little over a year later, he updated it to a second edition. -
During his time in college Samson get to use the TX-0 computer -
Samson helps in the details of the video game Spacewar! by Steve Russell in 1962, by making constellations as stars for the video games visuals. -
Samson joined the Digital Equipment Corporation and helped with key architectural concepts of the PDP-6 computer's design, and wrote the first FORTRAN compiler for that machine. -
At M.I.T. during the spring break of 1966, Samson worked on the New York subway map, where he wrote up a bunch of LISP functions based on his, Samson’s Rule of the New York subway. -
During 1970, Samson joined Systems Concepts, Inc. and became Director of Marketing and Director of Program Development, where he programmed the first Chinese-character digital communication.
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Samson wrote Type Justifier for the PDP-1 -
While at Nasa, Samson oversaw manufacturing and engineering for hardware. -
Samson impressively “designed and built a real-time signal-processing computer for music applications in the 1970s.” This computer was named, The Systems Concepts Digital Synthesizer, or the Samson Box, for short! -
During his time at Autodesk, Samson contributed to rendering, animation, web browsing, and scripting languages, he also received U.S. patents in software anti-piracy and virtual reality. -
Samson is now a member of the Computer History Museum PDP-1 restoration team, and as well as a docent at the Museum.