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New York (Stallman)
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Stallman, a freshman at Harvard, begins to work at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. (Stallman)
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Stallman earns a bachelor's degree in physics (Hosch).
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The AI technique was originally referred to as dependency-directed backtracking (Stallman).
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Stallman describes Emacs as "the first extensible text editor" in his online autobiography (Stallman).
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Stallman leaves MIT, purportedly over changes to the university copyright policies (Holsh); he later claims he left to work on the GNU project (Stallman).
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Stallman starts working on a free alternative to UNIX. He names it GNU, a recursive acronym that stands for "GNU is Not UNIX" (Holsh)
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The nonprofit's initial goals are to support the GNU project and sell the EMACS software (Gross).
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The GPL, written by Stallman and his lawyers, is the first license to implement the concept of copyleft (Free Software Foundation).
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The MacArthur, sometimes called the "genius award," provides money for Stallman to continue his work on the GNU project (Holsh).
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Stallman returns to MIT in a Visiting Scientist role, thanks largely to his work on GNU (Stallman).
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The second GNU General Public License explicitly disavows violating the license to resolve a patent infringement (Free Software Foundation).
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The GNU system utilities and Linus Torvalds's kernel are first combined to form the operating system now commonly called Linux or GNU/Linux (Holsch).
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His efforts are merged into the project that eventually becomes Wikipedia (Holsh), which Stallman later claims partial credit for inspiring (Stallman).
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The GNU General Public License Version 3 is a major rewrite of the famous copyleft license, and is the most current version (Free Software Foundation).
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Amid pressure over his comments about Jeffrey Epstein and pedophilia, Stallman steps down from his MIT post (Romo).
