Free as in Freedom. Richard Stallman’s Crusade for Free Software

Lippman lists the death of Richard’s paternal grandparents as the second traumatic event. “It really upset him”, she says. “He was very close to both his grandparents. Before they died, he was very outgoing, almost a leader-of-the-pack type with the other kids. After they died, he became much more emotionally withdrawn”.

From Stallman’s perspective, the emotional withdrawal was merely an attempt to deal with the agony of adolescence. Labeling his teenage years a “pure horror”, Stallman says he often felt like a deaf person amid a crowd of chattering music listeners.

“I often had the feeling that I couldn’t understand what other people were saying”, says Stallman, recalling the emotional bubble that insulated him from the rest of the adolescent and adult world. “I could understand the words, but something was going on underneath the conversations that I didn’t understand. I couldn’t understand why people were interested in the things other people said”.

For all the agony it produced, adolescence would have a encouraging effect on Stallman’s sense of individuality. At a time when most of his classmates were growing their hair out, Stallman preferred to keep his short. At a time when the whole teenage world was listening to rock and roll, Stallman preferred classical music. A devoted fan of science fiction, Mad magazine, and late-night TV, Stallman cultivated a distinctly off-the-wall personality that fed off the incomprehension of parents and peers alike.

“Oh, the puns”, says Lippman, still exasperated by the memory of her son’s teenage personality. “There wasn’t a thing you could say at the dinner table that he couldn’t throw back at you as a pun”.

Outside the home, Stallman saved the jokes for the adults who tended to indulge his gifted nature. One of the first was a summer-camp counselor who handed Stallman a print-out manual for the IBM 7094 computer during his 12th year. To a preteenager fascinated with numbers and science, the gift was a godsend.5 By the end of summer, Stallman was writing out paper programs according to the 7094’s internal specifications, anxiously anticipating getting a chance to try them out on a real machine.

With the first personal computer still a decade away, Stallman would be forced to wait a few years before getting access to his first computer. His first chance finally came during his junior year of high school. Hired on at the IBM New York Scientific Center, a now-defunct research facility in downtown Manhattan, Stallman spent the summer after high-school graduation writing his first program, a pre-processor for the 7094 written in the programming language PL/I. “I first wrote it in PL/I, then started over in assembler language when the PL/I program was too big to fit in the computer”, he recalls.

After that job at the IBM Scientific Center, Stallman had held a laboratory-assistant position in the biology department at Rockefeller University. Although he was already moving toward a career in math or physics, Stallman’s analytical mind impressed the lab director enough that a few years after Stallman departed for college, Lippman received an unexpected phone call. “It was the professor at Rockefeller”, Lippman says. “He wanted to know how Richard was doing. He was surprised to learn that he was working in computers. He’d always thought Richard had a great future ahead of him as a biologist”.

Stallman’s analytical skills impressed faculty members at Columbia as well, even when Stallman himself became a target of their ire. “Typically once or twice an hour [Stallman] would catch some mistake in the lecture”, says Breidbart. “And he was not shy about letting the professors know it immediately. It got him a lot of respect but not much popularity”.

Hearing Breidbart’s anecdote retold elicits a wry smile from Stallman. “I may have been a bit of a jerk sometimes”, he admits. “But I found kindred spirits among the teachers, because they, too, liked to learn. Kids, for the most part, didn’t. At least not in the same way”.

Hanging out with the advanced kids on Saturday nevertheless encouraged Stallman to think more about the merits of increased socialization. With college fast approaching, Stallman, like many in his Columbia Science Honors Program, had narrowed his list of desired schools down to two choices: Harvard and MIT. Hearing of her son’s desire to move on to the Ivy League, Lippman became concerned. As a 15-year-old high-school junior, Stallman was still having run-ins with teachers and administrators. Only the year before, he had pulled straight A’s in American History, Chemistry, French, and Algebra, but a glaring F in English reflected the ongoing boycott of writing assignments. Such miscues might draw a knowing chuckle at MIT, but at Harvard, they were a red flag.