Peter R. Samson

Creator of the Harmony Compiler for the PDP-1 and the Expensive Planetarium star display for Spacewar!, Samson is an American computer scientist best known for creating pioneering computer software. He studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) between 1958–1963. He wrote, with characteristic wit, the first editions of the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) dictionary, a predecessor to the Jargon File. He appeared in Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy.

As a member of the Tech Model Railroad Club in his student days at MIT, Samson was noted for his contributions to the Signals and Power Subcommittee, the technical side of the club. Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution outlines his interest in trains and electronics, and his influence in the club. "The club was in fact his gateway into hacking; and his ability to manipulate electronics and machine code to create programs, and he discovered his programming passion with the IBM 704, but had frustration with the high level of security around the machine," Levy explains. Only those with very high clearance were able to actually handle the computer, with all programs submitted to be processed through the machine by someone else. This meant Samson would not find out the results of his programs until a few days after submitting them.

Because of these restrictions to the IBM 704, it was not until he was introduced to the TX-0 (later nicknamed "Tixo") that he could explore his obsession with computer programming. Members of the Railroad Club were able to access the computer directly, without having to go through a superior.

Working with Jack Dennis on the TX-0 at MIT Building 26, he developed an interest in computing waveforms to synthesize music. For the PDP-1 he wrote the Harmony Compiler, with which PDP-1 users coded music. Also for the PDP-1, Samson wrote TJ-2 (Type Justifying Program), the predecessor of the troff and nroff page layout programs developed at Bell Labs, a War card game, and, with Alan Kotok, T-Square, a drafting program that used a Spacewar! controller for an input device. He also wrote the Expensive Planetarium star display for Spacewar!.

Samson has served as a contributing architect to the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-6, and wrote the machine's first Fortran compiler; he was also the author of Fortran II. At Systems Concepts, he programmed the first Chinese-character digital communication system, while serving as Director of Marketing and Director of Program Development. He designed the Systems Concepts Digital Synthesizer, which was built at Systems Concepts and served for ten years as the primary engine for the computer music group at Stanford University Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). He oversaw manufacturing engineering for hardware including the central memory subsystem for the ILLIAC IV supercomputer complex at the NASA Ames Research Center.

At Autodesk, Samson contributed to rendering, animation, Web browsing, and scripting languages. He received U.S. patents in software anti-piracy and virtual reality. In 1966 he attempted to ride all lines of the New York City Subway in the shortest possible time. True to the MIT hacker culture, he enlisted a computer in planning for the event. Despite missing out on the then fastest time, his attempt served as the inspiration for many similar subway racing attempts.

He appeared in the Computer History Museum "Mouse That Roared" panel discussion recorded in May 2006 to celebrate the restoration of a PDP-1. For the restoration project, Samson reverse-engineered music tapes from the PDP-1 era and built a player for the museum, where he has subsequently served as a docent.