"What he sees as a normal state of affairs, I see as a tragedy."
Hacker life, however, was not without tragedy. Stallman
characterizes his transition from weekend hacker to
full-time AI Lab denizen as a series of painful
misfortunes that could only be eased through the
euphoria of hacking. As Stallman himself has said, the
first misfortune was his graduation from Harvard. Eager
to continue his studies in physics, Stallman enrolled
as a graduate student at MIT. The choice of schools was
a natural one. Not only did it give Stallman the chance
to follow the footsteps of great MIT alumni: William
Shockley ('36), Richard P. Feynman ('39), and Murray
Gell-Mann ('51), it also put him two miles closer to
the AI Lab and its new PDP-10 computer. "My attention
was going toward programming, but I still thought,
well, maybe I can do both," Stallman says.
Toiling in the fields of graduate-level science by day
and programming in the monastic confines of the AI Lab
by night, Stallman tried to achieve a perfect balance.
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