Exploring Richard Stallman's Thoughts on MIT Hacker Culture

Last week I noted that the GNU project was celebrating its 30th anniversary. I thought it might be interesting to hear what Richard Stallman had to say about the environment in which he came up with the idea for GNU. What follows is part of a long interview I conducted with him in 1999, when I was carrying out research for "Rebel Code". Most of this is unpublished, and offers what I hope is some insights into the hacker culture at MIT, where Stallman was working.

His role there was to add capabilities to the operating system for the AI Lab's Digital PDP-10 minicomputer. The software was called ITS, the Incompatible Time-Sharing system - a conscious dig at the earlier Compatible Time-Sharing system, CTSS, which had been used to develop Multics, the progenitor of Unix.

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