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Richard Stallman was born on March 16, 1953 in New York City
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From 1967 to 1969, Stallman attended a Columbia University Saturday program for high school students
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During summer camp, Stallman would read manuals for the IBM 7094
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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,
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Attended Harvard University in the spring of 1970
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In 1971, near the end of his first year at Harvard, he became a programmer at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
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Stallman graduated from Harvard earning a bachelor's degree in Physics in 1974
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Decided to enroll as a graduate student at MIT instead of staying at Harvard, becoming a full time research assistant
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Stallman published a paper with his research partner Sussman in 1977 on an AI truth maintenance system, called dependency-directed backtracking.
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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
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Stallman announced the plan for the GNU operating system in September 1983 on many information sharing sites
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In February 1984, Stallman quit his job at MIT to work full-time on the GNU project
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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
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In 1991, Linus Torvalds used the GNU's development tools to produce the Linux kernel
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in 2015 he recieved the ACM Software System Award "For the development and leadership of GCC"