I took him to mean that he had programmed a subroutine that could call itself, but only as a curiosity, and that it was McCarthy's talk that made it clear for the first time what was important about recursion.
Speaking of Steve Russell, does anybody know what became of him? It's extraordinary that he wrote both the first Lisp interpreter and the first computer game.
That's a really interesting article about the guys who created Spacewar. I hadn't realized, for example, that there were six of them. Anyway, you should post it in its own right.
Speaking of Steve Russell, does anybody know what became of him? It's extraordinary that he wrote both the first Lisp interpreter and the first computer game.