Z:gnu-www-ja-google-engineering-talk--64ed1b-But other people wanted to get/en

But other people wanted to get copies of GNU Emacs to use it for their editing, to use it on their UNIX systems. There was no GNU system yet, there were just a few pieces. But this one piece turned out to be interesting by itself. People asked me for copies, so I had to work out the details of how to distribute it. Of course, I put a copy in the anonymous FTP server, and that was good for people on the net, but in 1985, most programmers were not on the Internet. So they asked me for copies; what was I going to say? I could have said, "I want to spend my time writing more pieces of the GNU system, not writing mag tapes, so please find a friend who can download it and put it on tape for you," and they would have found people sooner or later, because programmers generally know other programmers.