Hired on at the IBM New York Scientific Center, a
now-defunct research facility in downtown Manhattan,
Stallman spent the summer after high-school graduation
writing his first program, a pre-processor for the 7094
written in the programming language PL/I. "I first
wrote it in PL/I, then started over in assembler
language when the PL/I program was too big to fit in
the computer," he recalls.
After that job at the IBM Scientific Center, Stallman
had held a laboratory-assistant position in the biology
department at Rockefeller University. Although he was
already moving toward a career in math or physics,
Stallman's analytical mind impressed the lab director
enough that a few years after Stallman departed for
college, Lippman received an unexpected phone call. "It
was the professor at Rockefeller," Lippman says. "He
wanted to know how Richard was doing. He was surprised
to learn that he was working in computers. He'd always
thought Richard had a great future ahead of him as a biologist."
Stallman's analytical skills impressed faculty members
at Columbia as well, even when Stallman himself became
a target of their ire.
Pages:
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81