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Born
March 16, 1953 in New York City. (Hosch) -
Writes his first program
In the summer after graduating high school, Stallman wrote his first computer program while working at the IBM New York Scientific Center. The program was a pre-processor written in PL/I for the IBM 7094 (pictured above). (Williams ch. 3) -
Begins working at the AI Lab at MIT
While in his first year as an undergraduate at Harvard, Stallman starts working at the AI Lab at MIT. (Hosch) Stallman would eventually become a staff software programmer at the Lab. (Williams ch. 1) -
Graduates from Harvard
Stallman graduates from Harvard with a BS in Physics. (Hosch) -
Drops out of MIT
Stallman drops out of graduate program at MIT, after focusing more and more of his time on his work at the AI Lab. (Williams ch. 6) -
Hired as research project assistant in AI Lab
After dropping out of his graduate program, Stallman was hired by an MIT faculty member, Gerald Sussman (pictured above), to work in the AI Lab as a research project assistant on projects such as programs that would analyze circuit diagrams. (Williams ch. 6) -
Begins working on TECO
While working at the AI Lab, Stallman begins working on the "Text Editor and COrrector" program, which began life as a line editor for the PDP-6 computer. (Williams ch. 6) -
Encounters editor E
While visiting the Stanford AI Lab, Stallman encounters the editor program called E. This along with his work on TECO will lead to his work on the editor Emacs. (Williams ch. 6) -
Begins work on GNU project
Stallman announced his project on the Usenet newsgroup net.unix-wizards with the message: (Williams ch. 7) "Starting this Thanksgiving I am going to write a complete Unix-compatible software system called GNU (for Gnu’s Not Unix), and give it away free to everyone who can use it. Contributions of time, money, programs and equipment are greatly needed." (qtd. in Williams ch. 7) -
Leaves MIT AI Lab
Stallman left the staff of the MIT AI Lab due to software licensing issues instigated by competition between the companies Lisp Machines, Inc. and Symbolics, Inc. regarding a device called a Lisp Machine. (Williams ch. 7) -
Releases GNU Emacs
GNU Emacs, the free version of Emacs, was the first software project of the GNU Project. Stallman wrote a specific license for Emacs, the GNU Emacs License, but would realize the utility of developing a general license when writing project specific licenses for other GNU software. (Williams ch. 9) -
Starts the Free Software Foundation
After the release of GNU Emacs, hackers began to donate to the GNU Project and request tapes of the software, so the Free Software Foundation was founded to deal with the business aspect of the GNU Project. (Williams ch. 7) -
The General Public License is born
Stallman develops the GNU General Public License in while trying to develop a license for a GNU source-code debugger. Rather than write new licenses for each GNU project, he could write one license to cover every piece of software written by the GNU Project. (Williams ch. 9) -
Version 1.0 of the GNU GPL released
After beginning work on the GPL in 1986, Stallman releases the first version of the GNU General Public License. (Williams ch. 9) -
Gives Lecture at the Polytechnic University in Helsinki, Finland
Stallman gave a lecture at the Polytechnic University in Helsinki, Finland. A 21 year old Linus Torvalds was in attendance. Torvalds would go on to develop the Linux kernel, which when paired with the GNU software was to create a powerful OS. (Williams ch. 9) -
Stallman awarded the MacArthur Fellowship
Stallman is awarded the MacArthur Fellowship by the MacArthur Foundation. (Williams ch. 2). The MacArthur Foundations page on Stallman -
Release of GNU Hurd 0.9
Stallmans GNU Project continues - there is still no stable version of a GNU kernel, the latest release is GNU Hurd 0.9, which remains unstable. (GNU Hurd/news)
