Z:gnu-www-ja-stallman-kth--17b738-When I started programming, it/en

When I started programming, it was 1969, and I did it in an IBM laboratory in New York. After that I went to a school with a computer science department that was probably like most of them. There were some professors that were in charge of what was supposed to be done, and there were people who decided who could use what. There was a shortage of terminals for most people, but a lot of the professors had terminals of their own in their offices, which was wasteful, but typical of their attitude. When I visited the Artificial Intelligence lab at MIT I found a spirit that was refreshingly different from that. For example: there, the terminals was thought of as belonging to everyone, and professors locked them up in their offices on pain of finding their doors broken down. I was actually shown a cart with a big block of iron on it, that had been used to break down the door of one professors office, when he had the gall to lock up a terminal. There were very few terminals in those days, there was probably something like five display terminals for the system, so if one of them was locked up, it was a considerable disaster.