Stewart Nelson

Stewart Nelson is an American mathematician and programmer from The Bronx who co-founded Systems Concepts.

Biography

From a young age, Nelson was tinkering with electronics, aided and abetted by his father who was a physicist that had become an engineer. Stewart attended Poughkeepsie High School, graduating in the spring of 1963. From his first few days of High School, Stewart displayed his talents for hacking the international telephone trunk lines,

Nelson was known as a brilliant software programmer. He was influential in LISP, the assembly instructions for the Digital Equipment Corporation PDP, and a number of other systems.

The group of young hackers was known for working on systems after hours. One night, Nelson and others decided to rewire MIT's PDP-1 as a prank. Later, Margaret Hamilton tried to use the DEC-supplied DECAL assembler on the machine and it crashed repeatedly.