Free as in Freedom - Sam Williams (read this if .TXT) 📗

fate would have it, Stallman’s fanciful GNU Project missed its Thanksgiving launch date. By January, 1984, however, Stallman made good on his promise and fully immersed himself in the world of Unix software development. For a software architect raised on ITS, it was like designing suburban shopping malls instead of Moorish palaces. Even so, building a Unix-like operating system had its hidden advantages. ITS had been powerful, but it also possessed an Achilles’ heel: MIT hackers had designed it to take specific advantage of the DEC-built PDP line. When AI Lab administrators elected to phase out the lab’s powerful PDP-10 machine in the early 1980s, the operating system that hackers once likened to a vibrant city became an instant ghost town. Unix, on the other hand, was designed for mobility and long-term survival. Originally developed by junior scientists at AT&T, the program had slipped out under corporate-management radar, finding a happy home in the cash-strapped world of academic computer systems. With fewer resources than their MIT brethren, Unix developers had customized the software to ride atop a motley assortment of hardware systems: everything from the 16-bit PDP-11-a machine considered fit for only small tasks by most AI Lab hackers-to 32-bit mainframes such as the VAX 11/780. By 1983, a few companies, most notably Sun Microsystems, were even going so far as to develop a new generation of microcomputers, dubbed “workstations,” to take advantage of the increasingly ubiquitous operating system.

 

To facilitate this process, the developers in charge of designing the dominant Unix strains made sure to keep an extra layer of abstraction between the software and the machine. Instead of tailoring the operating system to take advantage of a specific machine’s resources-as the AI Lab hackers had done with ITS and the PDP-10-Unix developers favored a more generic, off-the-rack approach. Focusing more on the interlocking standards and specifications that held the operating system’s many subcomponents together, rather than the actual components themselves, they created a system that could be quickly modified to suit the tastes of any machine. If a user quibbled with a certain portion, the standards made it possible to pull out an individual subcomponent and either fix it or replace it with something better. Simply put, what the Unix approach lacked in terms of style or aesthetics, it more than made up for in terms of flexibility and economy, hence its rapid adoption.See Marshall Kirk McKusick, “Twenty Years of Berkeley

Unix,” Open Sources (O’Reilly & Associates, Inc., 1999): 38.

 

Stallman’s decision to start developing the GNU system was triggered by the end of the ITS system that the AI Lab hackers had nurtured for so long. The demise of ITS

had been a traumatic blow to Stallman. Coming on the heels of the Xerox laser printer episode, it offered further evidence that the AI Lab hacker culture was losing its immunity to business practices in the outside world.

 

Like the software code that composed it, the roots of ITS’ demise stretched way back. Defense spending, long a major font for computer-science research, had dried up during the post-Vietnam years. In a desperate quest for new funds, laboratories and universities turned to the private sector. In the case of the AI Lab, winning over private investors was an easy sell. Home to some of the most ambitious computer-science projects of the postwar era, the lab became a quick incubator of technology. Indeed, by 1980, most of the lab’s staff, including many hackers, were dividing its time between Institute and commercial projects.

 

What at first seemed like a win-win deal-hackers got to work on the best projects, giving the lab first look at many of the newest computer technologies coming down the pike-soon revealed itself as a Faustian bargain.

The more time hackers devoted to cutting-edge commercial projects, the less time they had to devote to general maintenance on the lab’s baroque software infrastructure. Soon, companies began hiring away hackers outright in an attempt to monopolize their time and attention. With fewer hackers to mind the shop, programs and machines took longer to fix. Even worse, Stallman says, the lab began to undergo a “demographic change.” The hackers who had once formed a vocal minority within the AI Lab were losing membership while “the professors and the students who didn’t really love the [PDP-10] were just as numerous as before.“See Richard Stallman (1986).

 

The breaking point came in 1982. That was the year the lab’s administration decided to upgrade its main computer, the PDP-10. Digital, the corporation that manufactured the PDP-10, had discontinued the line.

Although the company still offered a high-powered mainframe, dubbed the KL-10, the new machine required a drastic rewrite or “port” of ITS if hackers wanted to continue running the same operating system. Fearful that the lab had lost its critical mass of in-house programming talent, AI Lab faculty members pressed for Twenex, a commercial operating system developed by Digital. Outnumbered, the hackers had no choice but to comply.

 

“Without hackers to maintain the system, [faculty members] said, `We’re going to have a disaster; we must have commercial software,’” Stallman would recall a few years later. “They said, `We can expect the company to maintain it.’ It proved that they were utterly wrong, but that’s what they did.”

 

At first, hackers viewed the Twenex system as yet another authoritarian symbol begging to be subverted.

The system’s name itself was a protest. Officially dubbed TOPS-20 by DEC, it was a successor to TOPS-10, a commercial operating system DEC marketed for the PDP-10. Bolt Beranek Newman had deveoped an improved version, dubbed Tenex, which TOPS-20 drew upon.Multiple sources: see Richard Stallman interview,

Gerald Sussman email, and Jargon File 3.0.0.

http://www.clueless.com/jargon3.0.0/TWENEX.html Stallman, the hacker who coined the Twenex term, says he came up with the name as a way to avoid using the TOPS-20 name. “The system was far from tops, so there was no way I was going to call it that,” Stallman recalls. “So I decided to insert a `w’ in the Tenex name and call it Twenex.”

 

The machine that ran the Twenex/TOPS-20 system had its own derisive nickname: Oz. According to one hacker legend, the machine got its nickname because it required a smaller PDP-11 machine to power its terminal. One hacker, upon viewing the KL-10-PDP-11

setup for the first time, likened it to the wizard’s bombastic onscreen introduction in the Wizard of Oz. “I am the great and powerful Oz,” the hacker intoned. “Pay no attention to the PDP-11 behind that console.“See http://www.as.cmu.edu/~geek/humor/See_Figure_1.txt If hackers laughed when they first encountered the KL-10, their laughter quickly died when they encountered Twenex. Not only did Twenex boast built-in security, but the system’s software engineers had designed the tools and applications with the security system in mind. What once had been a cat-and-mouse game over passwords in the case of the Laboratory for Computer Science’s security system, now became an out-and-out battle over system management. System administrators argued that without security, the Oz system was more prone to accidental crashes. Hackers argued that crashes could be better prevented by overhauling the source code. Unfortunately, the number of hackers with the time and inclination to perform this sort of overhaul had dwindled to the point that the system-administrator argument prevailed.

 

Cadging passwords and deliberately crashing the system in order to glean evidence from the resulting wreckage, Stallman successfully foiled the system administrators’

attempt to assert control. After one foiled “coup d’etat,” Stallman issued an alert to the entire AI staff.

 

“There has been another attempt to seize power,”

Stallman wrote. “So far, the aristocratic forces have been defeated.” To protect his identity, Stallman signed the message “Radio Free OZ.”

 

The disguise was a thin one at best. By 1982, Stallman’s aversion to passwords and secrecy had become so well known that users outside the AI Laboratory were using his account as a stepping stone to the ARPAnet, the research-funded computer network that would serve as a foundation for today’s Internet. One such “tourist” during the early 1980s was Don Hopkins, a California programmer who learned through the hacking grapevine that all an outsider needed to do to gain access to MIT’s vaunted ITS system was to log in under the initials RMS and enter the same three-letter monogram when the system requested a password.

 

“I’m eternally grateful that MIT let me and many other people use their computers for free,” says Hopkins. “It meant a lot to many people.”

 

This so-called “tourist” policy, which had been openly tolerated by MIT management during the ITS years,See “MIT AI Lab Tourist Policy.”

http://catalog.com/hopkins/text/tourist-policy.html fell by the wayside when Oz became the lab’s primary link to the ARPAnet. At first, Stallman continued his policy of repeating his login ID as a password so outside users could follow in his footsteps. Over time, however, the Oz’s fragility prompted administrators to bar outsiders who, through sheer accident or malicious intent, might bring down the system. When those same administrators eventually demanded that Stallman stop publishing his password, Stallman, citing personal ethics, refused to do so and ceased using the Oz system altogether.3

 

“[When] passwords first appeared at the MIT AI Lab I [decided] to follow my belief that there should be no passwords,” Stallman would later say. “Because I don’t believe that it’s really desirable to have security on a computer, I shouldn’t be willing to help uphold the security regime.”

 

Stallman’s refusal to bow before the great and powerful Oz symbolized the growing tension between hackers and AI Lab management during the early 1980s. This tension paled in comparison to the conflict that raged within the hacker community itself. By the time the KL-10

arrived, the hacker community had already divided into two camps. The first centered around a software company called Symbolics, Inc. The second centered around Symbolics chief rival, Lisp Machines, Inc. (LMI). Both companies were in a race to market the Lisp Machine, a device built to take full advantage of the Lisp programming language.

 

Created by artificial-intelligence research pioneer John McCarthy, a MIT artificial-intelligence researcher during the late 1950s, Lisp is an elegant language well-suited for programs charged with heavy-duty sorting and processing. The language’s name is a shortened version of LISt Processing. Following McCarthy’s departure to the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT hackers refined the language into a local dialect dubbed MACLISP. The “MAC”

stood for Project MAC, the DARPA-funded research project that gave birth to the AI Lab and the Laboratory for Computer Science. Led by AI Lab arch-hacker Richard Greenblatt, AI Lab programmers during the 1970s built up an entire Lisp-based operating system, dubbed the Lisp Machine operating system. By 1980, the Lisp Machine project had generated two commercial spin-offs. Symbolics was headed by Russell Noftsker, a former AI Lab administrator, and Lisp Machines, Inc., was headed by Greenblatt.

 

The Lisp Machine software was hacker-built, meaning it was owned by MIT but available for anyone to copy as per hacker custom. Such a system limited the marketing advantage of any company hoping to license the software from MIT and market it as unique. To secure an advantage, and to bolster the aspects of the operating system that customers might consider attractive, the companies recruited various AI Lab hackers and set them working on various components of the Lisp Machine operating system outside the auspices of the AI Lab.

 

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.See H. P. Newquist, The Brain Makers: Genius, Ego, and

Greed in the Quest for Machines that Think (Sams Publishing, 1994): 172.

 

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