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Birth
Richard Stallman was born on March 16, 1953 in New York City -
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Highschool experience
From 1967 to 1969, Stallman attended a Columbia University Saturday program for high school students -
Intro into computers
During summer camp, Stallman would read manuals for the IBM 7094 -
First experience with actual computers
His first experience with actual computers was at the IBM New York Scientific Center when he was in high school. He was hired for the summer in 1970, -
Harvard
Attended Harvard University in the spring of 1970 -
MIT
In 1971, near the end of his first year at Harvard, he became a programmer at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory -
Harvard Graduation
Stallman graduated from Harvard earning a bachelor's degree in Physics in 1974 -
MIT Research Assistant
Decided to enroll as a graduate student at MIT instead of staying at Harvard, becoming a full time research assistant -
First publication
Stallman published a paper with his research partner Sussman in 1977 on an AI truth maintenance system, called dependency-directed backtracking. -
Disdain for proprietary software
In 1980, Stallman and some other hackers at the AI Lab were refused access to the source code of a new printer, which sparked his race against companies using such software -
The GNU Project
Stallman announced the plan for the GNU operating system in September 1983 on many information sharing sites -
Leaving MIT
In February 1984, Stallman quit his job at MIT to work full-time on the GNU project -
GNU and Unix
In 1985, Stallman published the GNU Manifesto, which outlined his motivation for creating a free operating system called GNU, which would be compatible with Unix -
GNU And Linux
In 1991, Linus Torvalds used the GNU's development tools to produce the Linux kernel -
Recent achievements
in 2015 he recieved the ACM Software System Award "For the development and leadership of GCC"