During the 1980s,
Tiemann had followed the GNU Project like an aspiring
jazz musician following a favorite artist. It wasn't
until the release of the GNU C Compiler in 1987,
however, that he began to grasp the full potential of
free software. Dubbing GCC a "bombshell," Tiemann says
the program's own existence underlined Stallman's
determination as a programmer.
"Just as every writer dreams of writing the great
American novel, every programmer back in the 1980s
talked about writing the great American compiler,"
Tiemman recalls. "Suddenly Stallman had done it. It was
very humbling."
"You talk about single points of failure, GCC was it,"
echoes Bostic. "Nobody had a compiler back then, until
GCC came along."
Rather than compete with Stallman, Tiemann decided to
build on top of his work. The original version of GCC
weighed in at 110,000 lines of code, but Tiemann
recalls the program as surprisingly easy to understand.
So easy in fact that Tiemann says it took less than
five days to master and another week to port the
software to a new hardware platform, National
Semiconductor's 32032 microchip.
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