Published at LXer:

In the earliest days of computers, just about everything could be considered free software. Computers were so large, unwieldy and difficult to understand that any reasonably well-written program would be passed around via punch cards or paper tape. Into that free software world Richard Stallman was born. In the 1960s, he programmed IBM System/360 mainframes in PL/I, a procedural language that itself is celebrating its 45th anniversary this year. In the 1970s, Stallman worked at the famous MIT Artificial Intelligence laboratory. Along the way, he saw software developers change their attitudes and move away from openness toward the proprietary. It was this shift in the hacker culture, as he called it, that eventually led him to strike out on his own in 1983.

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