Yeah, Steve Russell was a graduate student. Also, this is what McCarthy said during an interview: Steve Russell said, look, why don't I program this eval..., a

Yeah, Steve Russell was a graduate student. Also, this is what McCarthy said during an interview: Steve Russell said, look, why don't I program this eval..., and I said to him, ho, ho, you're confusing theory with practice, this eval is intended for reading, not for computing. But he went ahead and did it. That is, he compiled the eval in my paper into [IBM] 704 machine code, fixing bugs, and then advertised this as a Lisp interpreter, which it certainly was. So at that point Lisp had essentially the form that it has today.... (Source: http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html - not really surprising)