Z:gnu-www-ja-rms-lisp--498bfa-This spirit of building up gig/en

This spirit of building up gigantic, complicated programs to use in your own editing, and then exchanging them with other people, fueled the spirit of free-wheeling cooperation that we had at the AI Lab then. The idea was that you could give a copy of any program you had to someone who wanted a copy of it. We shared programs to whomever wanted to use them, they were human knowledge. So even though there was no organized political thought relating the way we shared software to the design of Emacs, I'm convinced that there was a connection between them, an unconscious connection perhaps. I think that it's the nature of the way we lived at the AI Lab that led to Emacs and made it what it was.