Even worse,
Stallman says, the lab began to undergo a "demographic
change." The hackers who had once formed a vocal
minority within the AI Lab were losing membership while
"the professors and the students who didn't really love
the [PDP-10] were just as numerous as before."See Richard Stallman (1986).
The breaking point came in 1982. That was the year the
lab's administration decided to upgrade its main
computer, the PDP-10. Digital, the corporation that
manufactured the PDP-10, had discontinued the line.
Although the company still offered a high-powered
mainframe, dubbed the KL-10, the new machine required a
drastic rewrite or "port" of ITS if hackers wanted to
continue running the same operating system. Fearful
that the lab had lost its critical mass of in-house
programming talent, AI Lab faculty members pressed for
Twenex, a commercial operating system developed by
Digital. Outnumbered, the hackers had no choice but to comply.
"Without hackers to maintain the system, [faculty
members] said, `We're going to have a disaster; we must
have commercial software,'" Stallman would recall a few
years later.
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