Russell Noftsker is an American entrepreneur who founded
Symbolics, a computer company, and was its first chairman and president.
Biography
Russell Noftsker was born February 1942 and graduated high school in
Carlsbad, New Mexico
Carlsbad ( ) is a city in and the county seat of Eddy County, New Mexico, United States. As of the 2020 census, the city population was 32,238. Carlsbad is centered at the intersection of U.S. Routes 62/180 and 285, and is the principal city ...
.
Noftsker earned a degree in engineering from
New Mexico State University
New Mexico State University (NMSU or NM State) is a public land-grant research university based primarily in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Founded in 1888, it is the oldest public institution of higher education in New Mexico and one of the state's ...
and was hired in 1965 by
Marvin Minsky
Marvin Lee Minsky (August 9, 1927 – January 24, 2016) was an American cognitive and computer scientist concerned largely with research of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, ...
as the administrator of the Project MAC AI Group, later to become the
AI Lab, replacing
Dan Edwards, who had recently left that post.
Lisp machines and Symbolics
Noftsker left the Lab in 1973, but would later return to the Lab. Noftsker and
Greenblatt working together with the team of
Lisp Machine
Lisp machines are general-purpose computers designed to efficiently run Lisp as their main software and programming language, usually via hardware support. They are an example of a high-level language computer architecture, and in a sense, they ...
developers to commercialize the technology. Differences over business strategy and direction split the group from Greenblatt in February 1979. A year later Noftsker and the rest of that group formed
Symbolics Inc. with Robert Adams taking on the role of president and chairman.
Noftsker and the then CEO Brian Sear were forced out of Symbolics completely by the board in early 1988 after an internal battle over lowering prices. Noftsker had already been forced to resign as president for 2 months in April 1984 by the board and again in late 1986, retained as chairman & CEO the first time then as Chairman the second.
In 1995 at the invitation of Symbolics customer, Steve Gander of Princeton Capital, Noftsker joined a group which bought the assets of Symbolics out of bankruptcy.
See also
* ''
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution''
References
External links
"If It Works, It's Not AI: A Commercial Look at Artificial Intelligence startups"
Living people
American computer businesspeople
Lisp (programming language) people
1942 births
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