"I felt basically that I'd lost all my energy,"
Stallman recalls. "I'd lost my energy to do anything
but what was most immediately tempting. The energy to
do something else was gone. I was in total despair."
Stallman retreated from the world even further,
focusing entirely on his work at the AI Lab. By
October, 1975, he dropped out of MIT, never to go back.
Software hacking, once a hobby, had become his calling.
Looking back on that period, Stallman sees the
transition from full-time student to full-time hacker
as inevitable. Sooner or later, he believes, the
siren's call of computer hacking would have overpowered
his interest in other professional pursuits. "With
physics and math, I could never figure out a way to
contribute," says Stallman, recalling his struggles
prior to the knee injury. "I would have been proud to
advance either one of those fields, but I could never
see a way to do that. I didn't know where to start.
With software, I saw right away how to write things
that would run and be useful.
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