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has since been granted three separate honourary doctorates from various in-
stitutions around the world, as well as many awards: the 1991 Association for
Computing Machinery's Grace Hopper Award for his work on the original Emacs
editor; the 1998 Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award together with
Linus Torvalds; the 1999 Yuri Rubinski Memorial Award; and the 2001 Takeda
Techno-Entrepreneurship Award for Social and Economic Well-Being. Stallman
is currently chief GNU of the GNU project and president of the FSF. You may
get a flavour of Stallman's ideas by consulting [270].
Gosper and Greenblatt
: The hacker ethic, discussed above and epito-
mized in Levy's topic [150], is actually a reflection of the philosophy developed
by Stallman and Bill Gosper, who many consider to be Stallman's mentor at
the MIT AI Lab. R. William Gosper, Jr. is a computational mathematician.
He and Richard Greenblatt, known as the “hacker of hackers”, are said to have
founded the hacker community. Gosper was associated with the MIT AI Lab
in various capacities from 1965 to 1974. He was involved with MACSYMA (see
page 167) from 1974 to 1999, which included his being a consultant to Symbolics,
discussed above. Richard Greenblatt is a computer scientist who also spent his
early days at the MIT AI Lab. He was, in fact, the principal designer of the MIT
Lisp machine.
10.13
Some of Greenblatt's exploits are described in Rheingold's
topic [227]. The director of the MIT AI Lab, Marvin Minsky, Greenblatt's advi-
sor, gave the hackers access to the machines, being impressed with their talent
and desire to explore. Many of the MIT students interested in the AI Lab had
been exploring the phone switching network and the control systems of the Tech
Model Railroad Club (TMRC), near legendary as the “cradle of hackerdom”.
The First Wave
: Gosper and Greenblatt were members of what is com-
monly considered to be the “first wave” of hackers. This first wave encompassed
the pioneer hackers from the age of what we now consider to be the primitive
era (those more sentimental might call it the “golden age” of hackers). Other
hackers from this time period who are worthy of note are Peter Deutsch, Tom
Knight, and Jerry Sussman.
Deutsch
: L. Peter Deutsch began early, at the age of twelve, when he was at
the MIT AI Lab where he discovered the TX-0, which was a three-million-dollar
(U.S.) computer that filled a small room. It was the world's first PC for the
MIT hackers who embraced it as such. It was different from computers of its
time since it was interactive. This allowed hackers to explore on the machine.
He hacked the TX-0 along with his older counterparts. When he was a high-
school student in 1963, he created the first interactive Lisp implementation for
the PDP-1 computer.
10.14
Although he grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
he has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area since 1964. He received his Ph.D.
10.13
Lisp machines were general-purpose machines running the Lisp language. In the early
stages of AI research, AI programs were run using the Lisp language (see Footnote 10.10 on
page 386). It was in this context that Greenblatt began the Lisp machine project at MIT in
1974. Although these machines had an interesting developmental history, they went the way
of the dinosaur once computers with microprocessors came on the scene. Their advent meant
that desktop PCs could run Lisp programs much faster than Lisp machines.
10.14
The PDP-1 was the first computer in Digital Equipment Corporation's (DEC)'s PDP
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