"I started crying right there in the equipment room,"
he says. "Seeing the machine there, dead, with nobody
left to fix it, it all drove home how completely my
community had been destroyed."
Stallman would have little opportunity to mourn. The
Lisp Machine, despite all the furor it invoked and all
the labor that had gone into making it, was merely a
sideshow to the large battles in the technology
marketplace. The relentless pace of computer
miniaturization was bringing in newer, more powerful
microprocessors that would soon incorporate the
machine's hardware and software capabilities like a
modern metropolis swallowing up an ancient desert village.
Riding atop this microprocessor wave were
hundreds-thousands-of commercial software programs,
each protected by a patchwork of user licenses and
nondisclosure agreements that made it impossible for
hackers to review or share source code. The licenses
were crude and ill-fitting, but by 1983 they had become
strong enough to satisfy the courts and scare away
would-be interlopers.
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