Z:gnu-www-ja-rms-nyu-2001-transcript--0fa84f-So, in January 1984, I quit my/en

So, in January 1984, I quit my job at MIT to start writing pieces of GNU. They were nice enough to let me keep using their facilities though. And, at the time, I thought we would write all these pieces, and make an entire GNU system, and then we'd say, &ldquo;Come and get it&rdquo;, and people would start to use it. That's not what happened. The first pieces I wrote were just equally good replacements, with fewer bugs for some pieces of Unix, but they weren't tremendously exciting. Nobody particularly wanted to get them and install them. But then, in September 1984, I started writing GNU Emacs, which was my second implementation of Emacs, and by early 1985, it was working. I could use it for all my editing, which was a big relief, because I had no intention of learning to use VI, the Unix editor. [Laughter] So, until that time, I did my editing on some other machine, and saved the files through the network, so that I could test them. But when GNU Emacs was running well enough for me to use it, it was also &mdash; other people wanted to use it too.