Z:gnu-www-ja-rms-nyu-2001-transcript--fb1162-Now, I had wanted to put a win/en

Now, I had wanted to put a window system into GNU from day one. I wrote a couple of window systems at MIT before I started GNU. And so, even though Unix had no window system in 1984, I decided that GNU would have one. But, we never ended up writing a GNU window system, because X came along. And I said, Goody! One big job we don't have to do. We'll use X. So I basically said, let's take X, and put it into the GNU system. And we'll make the other parts of GNU, you know, work with X, when appropriate. And we found other pieces of software that had been written by other people, like the text formatter TeX, some library code from Berkeley. At that time there was Berkeley Unix, but it was not free software. This library code, initially, was from a different group at Berkeley, that did research on floating point. And, so, we kept, we fit in these pieces.