The story of Stallman's work on TECO during the 1970s
is inextricably linked with Stallman's later leadership
of the free software movement. It is also a significant
stage in the history of computer evolution, so much so
that a brief recapitulation of that evolution is
necessary. During the 1950s and 1960s, when computers
were first appearing at universities, computer
programming was an incredibly abstract pursuit. To
communicate with the machine, programmers created a
series of punch cards, with each card representing an
individual software command. Programmers would then
hand the cards over to a central system administrator
who would then insert them, one by one, into the
machine, waiting for the machine to spit out a new set
of punch cards, which the programmer would then
decipher as output. This process, known as " batch
processing," was cumbersome and time consuming. It was
also prone to abuses of authority. One of the
motivating factors behind hackers' inbred aversion to
centralization was the power held by early system
operators in dictating which jobs held top priority.
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