Z:gnu-www-ja-nit-india--16d551-So 20 years and 1 month ago, i/en

So 20 years and 1 month ago, in January 1984, I quit my job at MIT and began developing the GNU system. I didn't do it all myself, of course, I was also trying to recruit other people to help and gradually over the years more and more people joined in. During the 1980s, well we had only a few parts of the GNU system; some of these parts were superior and so people would take them and install them on their nonfree systems. For instance, the GNU Emacs text editor and the GNU C compiler. These were programs that people would learn even on top of their nonfree Unix system. But our real goal was not just to have a few popular programs, the goal was to make a complete system. So that we should reject the nonfree systems; reject nonfree software, escape from the bondage of nonfree software. So we kept filling in these gaps in the system and by the early 90s we had just one important gap remaining and that was the kernel.