He's working alone! It's incredible
anyone could do this alone!"See Steven Levy, Hackers (Penguin USA [paperback],
1984): 426.
For Stallman, the months spent playing catch up with
Symbolics evoke a mixture of pride and profound
sadness. As a dyed-in-the-wool liberal whose father had
served in World War II, Stallman is no pacifist. In
many ways, the Symbolics war offered the rite of
passage toward which Stallman had been careening ever
since joining the AI Lab staff a decade before. At the
same time, however, it coincided with the traumatic
destruction of the AI Lab hacker culture that had
nurtured Stallman since his teenage years. One day,
while taking a break from writing code, Stallman
experienced a traumatic moment passing through the
lab's equipment room. There, Stallman encountered the
hulking, unused frame of the PDP-10 machine. Startled
by the dormant lights, lights that once actively
blinked out a silent code indicating the status of the
internal program, Stallman says the emotional impact
was not unlike coming across a beloved family member's
well-preserved corpse.
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