By the end of the
session, they had managed to hack the pretty print
source code to just under 100 lines. "My fingers were
on the keyboard the whole time," Steele recalls, "but
it felt like both of our ideas were flowing onto the
screen. He told me what to type, and I typed it."
The length of the session revealed itself when Steele
finally left the AI Lab. Standing outside the building
at 545 Tech Square, he was surprised to find himself
surrounded by nighttime darkness. As a programmer,
Steele was used to marathon coding sessions. Still,
something about this session was different. Working
with Stallman had forced Steele to block out all
external stimuli and focus his entire mental energies
on the task at hand. Looking back, Steele says he found
the Stallman mind-meld both exhilarating and scary at
the same time. "My first thought afterward was: it was
a great experience, very intense, and that I never
wanted to do it again in my life."
A Stark Moral Choice
On September 27, 1983, computer programmers logging on
to the Usenet newsgroup net.
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