The most aggressive in this strategy was Symbolics. By the end of 1980, the company had hired 14 AI Lab staffers as part-time consultants to develop its version of the Lisp Machine. Apart from Stallman, the rest signed on to help LMI.[7]
At first, Stallman accepted both companies’ attempt to commercialize the Lisp machine, even though it meant more work for him. Both licensed the Lisp Machine OS source code from MIT, and it was Stallman’s job to update the lab’s own Lisp Machine to keep pace with the latest innovations. Although Symbolics’ license with MIT gave Stallman the right to review, but not copy, Symbolics’ source code, Stallman says a “gentleman’s agreement” between Symbolics management and the AI Lab made it possible to borrow attractive snippets in traditional hacker fashion.
On March 16, 1982, a date Stallman remembers well because it was his birthday, Symbolics executives decided to end this gentlemen’s agreement. The move was largely strategic. LMI, the primary competition in the Lisp Machine marketplace, was essentially using a copy of the AI Lab Lisp Machine. Rather than subsidize the development of a market rival, Symbolics executives elected to enforce the letter of the license. If the AI Lab wanted its operating system to stay current with the Symbolics operating system, the lab would have to switch over to a Symbolics machine and sever its connection to LMI.
As the person responsible for keeping up the lab’s Lisp Machine, Stallman was incensed. Viewing this announcement as an “ultimatum”, he retaliated by disconnecting Symbolics’ microwave communications link to the laboratory. He then vowed never to work on a Symbolics machine and pledged his immediate allegiance to LMI. “The way I saw it, the AI Lab was a neutral country, like Belgium in World War I”, Stallman says. “If Germany invades Belgium, Belgium declares war on Germany and sides with Britain and France”.
The circumstances of the so-called “Symbolics War” of 1982-1983 depend heavily on the source doing the telling. When Symbolics executives noticed that their latest features were still appearing in the AI Lab Lisp Machine and, by extension, the LMI Lisp machine, they installed a “spy” program on Stallman’s computer terminal. Stallman says he was rewriting the features from scratch, taking advantage of the license’s review clause but also taking pains to make the source code as different as possible. Symbolics executives argued otherwise and took their case to MIT administration. According to 1994 book, The Brain Makers: Genius, Ego, and Greed, and the Quest for Machines That Think, written by Harvey Newquist, the administration responded with a warning to Stallman to “stay away” from the Lisp Machine project.[8] According to Stallman, MIT administrators backed Stallman up. “I was never threatened”, he says. “I did make changes in my practices, though. Just to be ultra safe, I no longer read their source code. I used only the documentation and wrote the code from that”.
Whatever the outcome, the bickering solidified Stallman’s resolve. With no source code to review, Stallman filled in the software gaps according to his own tastes and enlisted members of the AI Lab to provide a continuous stream of bug reports. He also made sure LMI programmers had direct access to the changes. “I was going to punish Symbolics if it was the last thing I did”, Stallman says.
Such statements are revealing. Not only do they shed light on Stallman’s nonpacifist nature, they also reflect the intense level of emotion triggered by the conflict. According to another Newquist-related story, Stallman became so irate at one point that he issued an email threatening to “wrap myself in dynamite and walk into Symbolics’ offices”.[9] Although Stallman would deny any memory of the email and still describes its existence as a “vicious rumor”, he acknowledges that such thoughts did enter his head. “I definitely did have fantasies of killing myself and destroying their building in the process”, Stallman says. “I thought my life was over”.[5]
The level of despair owed much to what Stallman viewed as the “destruction” of his “home”-i.e., the demise of the AI Lab’s close-knit hacker subculture. In a later email interview with Levy, Stallman would liken himself to the historical figure Ishi, the last surviving member of the Yahi, a Pacific Northwest tribe wiped out during the Indian wars of the 1860s and 1870s. The analogy casts Stallman’s survival in epic, almost mythical, terms. In reality, however, it glosses over the tension between Stallman and his fellow AI Lab hackers prior to the Symbolics-LMI schism. Instead of seeing Symbolics as an exterminating force, many of Stallman’s colleagues saw it as a belated bid for relevance. In commercializing the Lisp Machine, the company pushed hacker principles of engineer-driven software design out of the ivory-tower confines of the AI Lab and into the corporate marketplace where manager-driven design principles held sway. Rather than viewing Stallman as a holdout, many hackers saw him as a troubling anachronism.
Stallman does not dispute this alternate view of historical events. In fact, he says it was yet another reason for the hostility triggered by the Symbolics “ultimatum”. Even before Symbolics hired away most of the AI Lab’s hacker staff, Stallman says many of the hackers who later joined Symbolics were shunning him. “I was no longer getting invited to go to Chinatown”, Stallman recalls. “The custom started by Greenblatt was that if you went out to dinner, you went around or sent a message asking anybody at the lab if they also wanted to go. Sometime around 1980-1981, I stopped getting asked. They were not only not inviting me, but one person later confessed that he had been pressured to lie to me to keep their going away to dinner without me a secret”.
Although Stallman felt anger toward the hackers who orchestrated this petty form of ostracism, the Symbolics controversy dredged up a new kind of anger, the anger of a person about to lose his home. When Symbolics stopped sending over its source-code changes, Stallman responded by holing up in his MIT offices and rewriting each new software feature and tool from scratch. Frustrating as it may have been, it guaranteed that future Lisp Machine users had unfettered access to the same features as Symbolics users.
It also guaranteed Stallman’s legendary status within the hacker community. Already renowned for his work with Emacs, Stallman’s ability to match the output of an entire team of Symbolics programmers-a team that included more than a few legendary hackers itself-still stands has one of the major human accomplishments of the Information Age, or of any age for that matter. Dubbing it a “master hack” and Stallman himself a “virtual John Henry of computer code”, author Steven Levy notes that many of his Symbolics-employed rivals had no choice but to pay their idealistic former comrade grudging respect. Levy quotes Bill Gosper, a hacker who eventually went to work for Symbolics in the company’s Palo Alto office, expressing amazement over Stallman’s output during this period:
I can see something Stallman wrote, and I might decide it was bad (probably not, but somebody could convince me it was bad), and I would still say, “But wait a minute-Stallman doesn’t have anybody to argue with all night over there. He’s working alone! It’s incredible anyone could do this alone!”[10]
For Stallman, the months spent playing catch up with Symbolics evoke a mixture of pride and profound sadness. As a dyed-in-the-wool liberal whose father had served in World War II, Stallman is no pacifist. In many ways, the Symbolics war offered the rite of passage toward which Stallman had been careening ever since joining the AI Lab staff a decade before. At the same time, however, it coincided with the traumatic destruction of the AI Lab hacker culture that had nurtured Stallman since his teenage years. One day, while taking a break from writing code, Stallman experienced a traumatic moment passing through the lab’s equipment room. There, Stallman encountered the hulking, unused frame of the PDP-10 machine. Startled by the dormant lights, lights that once actively blinked out a silent code indicating the status of the internal program, Stallman says the emotional impact was not unlike coming across a beloved family member’s well-preserved corpse.
7.
See H. P. Newquist,
9.