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Peter R. Samson (born 1941 in Fitchburg, Massachusetts•) is an American computer scientist. Samson studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1958-1963. While at MIT he wrote the first editions of the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) Dictionary, the predecessor of the Jargon File. With Jack Dennis on the TX-0 at MIT Building 26, he became interested in computing waveforms to synthesize music. For the PDP-1 he wrote the Harmony Compiler with which PDP-1 users coded music. Samson wrote the Expensive Planetarium star display for Spacewar!. Also for the PDP-1 he 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. Samson was a contributing architect of the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-6 and wrote the machine's first Fortran compiler. He is the author of Fortran II. Director of marketing and director of program development at Systems Concepts, Samson programmed the first Chinese-character digital communication system and designed the Systems Concepts Digital Synthesizer, for ten years the primary engine for the computer music group at Stanford University Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). Samson 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. Samson received U.S. patents in software anti-piracy and virtual reality. Samson appears 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 he reverse-engineered music tapes from the PDP-1 era and built a player for the museum. Samson appears in Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy.
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