Rather than
viewing Stallman as a holdout, many hackers saw him as
a troubling anachronism.
Stallman does not dispute this alternate view of
historical events. In fact, he says it was yet another
reason for the hostility triggered by the Symbolics
"ultimatum." Even before Symbolics hired away most of
the AI Lab's hacker staff, Stallman says many of the
hackers who later joined Symbolics were shunning him.
"I was no longer getting invited to go to Chinatown,"
Stallman recalls. "The custom started by Greenblatt was
that if you went out to dinner, you went around or sent
a message asking anybody at the lab if they also wanted
to go. Sometime around 1980-1981, I stopped getting
asked. They were not only not inviting me, but one
person later confessed that he had been pressured to
lie to me to keep their going away to dinner without me
a secret."
Although Stallman felt anger toward the hackers who
orchestrated this petty form of ostracism, the
Symbolics controversy dredged up a new kind of anger,
the anger of a person about to lose his home.
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