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Birth
Peter Samson was born in Fitchburg, Massachusetts in 1941 ("Peter Samson", n.d.) -
Tech Model Railroad Club
Peter Samson had been a member of the Tech Model Railroad Club since his first week at MIT in the fall of 1958 (Levy, 2010). -
MIT
Peter Samson started his freshman year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the winter of 1958 (Levy, 2010). -
TMRC Dictionary
Peter Samson wrote the first edition of the TMRC Dictionary. (Samson, n.d.) -
Harmony Compiler
Creation of a ‘harmony compiler’ by Samson allowed for sophisticated music to be played on the PDP-1 . ("PDP-1", n.d.) -
Spacewar!
Peter Samson upgraded Spacewar! by replacing the randomly generated star chart of Russell’s game with an authentic backdrop culled directly from the actual night sky. Samson also worked in code to continually update the star map based on the duration of time for which players had been playing. (Smith, 2018). -
TJ-2
Samson published the first page layout program called the Type Justifying Program to run on the PDP-1. Using English text as input, TJ-2 aligns left and right margins, justifying the output using white space and word hyphenation (Samson, 2012). -
Digital Equipment Corporation
Samson joined DEC in 1964 and contributed key architectural concepts to the PDP-6 computer and wrote the first FORTRAN compiler for that machine ("PDP-1", n.d.). -
New York Subway
Samson programmed the PDP-6 with the complete schedules of the New York subway system, and used it interactively on-line to win the competition for traveling through the entire system in minimum time. ("Peter Samson", n.d.) -
Systems Concepts, Inc.
Samson was Director of Marketing and Director of Program Development at Systems Concepts, Inc. in San Francisco, CA. ("Peter Samson", n.d.). -
Chinese-Character Digital Communication System
At Systems Concepts, Inc Samson programmed the first Chinese-character digital communication system ("Peter Samson", n.d.). -
NASA/Ames Research
Samson was in charge of manufacturing engineering for many hardware products, including the Central Memory subsystem for the ILLIAC IV supercomputer complex at the NASA/Ames Research Center (PDP-1, n.d.). -
Samson Box
Commissioned by the founders of the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford in 1975, Samson designed the Systems Concepts Digital Synthesizer (Samson Box) installed at Stanford in 1977 (Loy, 2013). -
Autodesk Inc.
While working at Autodesk Inc. Samson contributed significant modules for rendering, animation, Web browsing, and scripting languages. While working there Samson received U.S. patents in the areas of software anti-piracy and virtual reality. ("Peter Samson", n.d.) -
Docent
Samson is currently a member of the Computer History Museum PDP-1 restoration team and a docent at the Museum. (PDP-1, n.d.)
