Free as in Freedom in English: Chapter 1. The Fateful Printer

Free as in Freedom in English: Chapter 2. 2001: A Hacker Odyssey

The Portrait of a Hacker in Youth

Alice Lippman, Richard Stallman's mother, still remembers the moment her son showed his giftedness.

"I think it happened when he was eight," she says.

It was 1961. Lippman had recently divorced and became a single mother. She moved with her son into a tiny one-bedroom apartment located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It was here that she spent that weekend day. Flipping through an issue of Scientific American, Alice came across her favorite column—Martin Gardner's "Mathematical Games." At the time, she was working as a substitute art teacher, and Gardner's puzzles were perfect for stretching the brain. Sitting on the couch next to her son, who was engrossed in a book, Alice took on the week’s puzzle.

"I couldn't call myself a puzzle-solving specialist," Lippman admits, "but for me, as an artist, they were helpful because they exercised my intellect and made it more flexible."

But today, all her attempts to solve the puzzle crashed against the wall. Alice was ready to throw the magazine across the room in frustration when she suddenly felt a gentle tug at her sleeve. It was Richard. He was asking if she needed help.

Alice looked at her son, then at the puzzle, and then back at her son, expressing doubt that he could be of any assistance. "I asked him if he had read the magazine. He said yes, he had, and even solved the puzzle. Then he started explaining how it was solved. That moment stuck in my memory for life."

After listening to her son’s solution, Alice shook her head—her doubt had turned into outright disbelief. "Well, he had always been a smart and capable boy," she says, "but that was the first time I encountered such unexpectedly advanced thinking."

Now, 30 years later, Lippman laughs as she recalls it. "To be honest, I didn’t really understand his solution, neither then nor later," Alice recounts, "I was just impressed that he knew the answer."

We are sitting at the dining table in a spacious three-bedroom Manhattan apartment that Alice moved into with Richard in 1967 after marrying Maurice Lipman. Reflecting on her son's early years, Alice exudes a typical Jewish mother's pride mixed with embarrassment. From here, you can see a cabinet with large photographs of Richard with a bushy beard and in academic robes. Photos of Lipman's nieces and nephews are interspersed with pictures of gnomes. Laughing, Alice explains: 'Richard insisted I buy them after he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Glasgow. He said to me then, ‘You know what, Mom? This is the first graduation ceremony I’ve ever attended.’

Such remarks reflect the sense of humor that is vital for raising a prodigy. You can be sure: for every well-known story of Stallman's stubbornness and eccentricity, his mother can recount a dozen more.

‘He was a fierce conservative,’ she says, throwing her hands up in a picture-like irritation, ‘we had even gotten used to hearing his furious reactionary rhetoric at the dinner table. I tried to start a union with other teachers, and Richard was very angry with me. He saw unions as breeding grounds for corruption. He also fought against social security. He believed it would be much better if people provided for themselves through investing. Who knew that in just 10 years he would become such an idealist? I remember his stepsister once came up to me and asked, ‘Goodness, what will he grow into? A fascist?’

Alice married Richard's father, Daniel Stallman, in 1948, divorced him 10 years later, and has raised her son almost single-handedly since then, although the father remained his guardian. Therefore, Alice can rightly claim to know her son's character well, particularly his obvious aversion to authority. She also confirms his fanatical thirst for knowledge. These traits have made her life challenging. The home has turned into a battlefield.

“There were even issues with feeding him; it was as if he never wanted to eat at all,” recalls Lippman about what happened to Richard from around 8 years old until he graduated, “I would call him for dinner, but he would ignore me as if he didn't hear. Only after the ninth or tenth time would he finally get distracted and pay attention to me. He was completely absorbed in his activities, and it was difficult to pull him away from them.”

For his part, Richard describes those events in a similar way, but gives them a political undertone.

“I loved to read,” he says, “if I was engrossed in a book and my mom told me to go eat or sleep, I just didn’t listen to her. I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t allowed to read. I saw no reason at all why I should do what I was told. Essentially, I was applying to family relationships everything I had read about democracy and personal freedom. I refused to understand why these principles didn’t extend to children.”

Richard also preferred to follow his own sense of personal freedom at school rather than obey demands from above. By age 11, he was two grades ahead of his peers and experienced many disappointments typical of a gifted child in a middle school environment. Soon after the memorable episode with the puzzle solution, Richard's mother entered an era of regular disputes and explanations with his teachers.

"He completely ignored written assignments," recalls Alice about the early conflicts. "In my opinion, his last work in elementary school was an essay on the history of numeral systems in the West in 4th grade." He refused to write on topics that did not interest him. Stallman, possessing phenomenal analytical thinking, delved into mathematics and the exact sciences at the expense of other subjects. Some teachers considered this determination, but Lippman saw it as impatience and impulsiveness. The exact sciences were already represented in the curriculum much more broadly than those that Richard did not like. When Stallman was 10 or 11 years old, his classmates started a game of one of the varieties of American football, after which Richard came home in a fury. "He really wanted to play, but it turned out that his coordination and other physical skills left much to be desired," Lippman recounts. "This made him very angry."

Angered, Stallman focused even more on mathematics and the exact sciences. However, even in these areas familiar to Richard, his impatience sometimes caused problems. By the age of seven, diving into algebra textbooks, he did not see the need to be simpler in communicating with adults. Once, when Stallman was in middle school, Alice hired a tutor for him, a student from Columbia University. One class was enough for the student to never appear at their apartment again. "Apparently, what Richard told him simply did not fit into his poor head," Lippman speculates.

Another favorite memory of his mother dates back to the early 60s, when Stallman was about seven years old. Two years had passed since his parents' divorce, and Alice moved with her son from Queens to the Upper West Side, where Richard loved to go to the park on Riverside Drive to launch toy rocket models. Soon, this pastime evolved into a serious and thorough hobby—he even began to keep detailed records of each launch. Like with his interest in mathematical problems, this obsession received little attention until one day, before a major NASA launch, his mother jokingly asked him if he wanted to see whether the space agency was following his notes correctly.

"He was furious," Lippman recounts, "and could only respond, 'I haven't shown them my records yet!'. He was probably really planning to show something to NASA." Stallman himself doesn’t remember the incident, but he says that he would have felt embarrassed in such a situation because he actually had nothing to show NASA.

These family anecdotes were the initial signs of Stallman's characteristic obsession, which has not left him to this day. When the children ran to the table, Richard continued reading in his room. When the kids played soccer, mimicking the legendary Johnny Unitas, Richard pretended to be an astronaut. "I was strange," Stallman summarizes his childhood years in a 1999 interview, "by a certain age, I only had teachers as friends." Richard was not ashamed of his peculiar traits and tendencies, unlike his inability to get along with people, which he considered a real misfortune. Nonetheless, both elements equally contributed to his alienation from everyone.

Alice decided to fully embrace her son's passions, even though it threatened new challenges at school. At 12, Richard spent the entire summer attending science camps, and with the start of the school year, he began attending a private school as well. One of the teachers advised Lippman to enroll his son in the Columbia Science Achievement Program that had been developed in New York for gifted middle and high school students. Stallman willingly added classes from this program to his extracurricular lessons, and soon he started visiting the Columbia University campus, located among residential neighborhoods, every Saturday.

According to the memories of Dan Chess, one of Stallman's classmates in the Columbia program, Richard stood out even among this gathering of similarly obsessed mathematics and science enthusiasts. "Of course, we were all nerds and geeks there," Chess recalls, now a mathematics professor at Hunter College, "but Stallman was incredibly otherworldly. He was just an absolute genius. I know a lot of smart people, but I think Stallman is the smartest person I have ever met."

Programmer Seth Bravdbar, also a graduate of this program, completely agrees with that. He got along well with Richard because he, like him, was passionate about science fiction and attended conventions. Seth remembers Stallman as a 15-year-old kid in dismal clothes, leaving a "terrible impression" on people, especially on other fifteen-year-olds.

"It's hard to explain," Bravdbar says, "he wasn't exactly completely introverted, he was just overly obsessed. Richard impressed with his deep knowledge, but his apparent aloofness certainly didn't add to his appeal."

Such descriptions lead one to wonder: is there reason to believe that beneath epithets like "obsession" and "aloofness" lay what is now considered adolescent behavioral disorders? In December 2001, a journal article noted... Wired An article titled 'Geek Syndrome' has been released, describing scientifically gifted children with high-functioning autism and Asperger's syndrome. The recollections of their parents, detailed in the article, closely resemble the accounts of Alice Lippman. Stallman himself reflects on this. In a 2000 interview for Toronto Star he suggested that he might have 'borderline autistic disorder.' However, the article carelessly framed his suggestion as a certainty.

In light of the fact that the definitions of many so-called 'behavioral disorders' are still quite vague, this suggestion appears particularly realistic. As noted by Steve Silberman, author of the article 'Geek Syndrome,' American psychiatrists have only recently acknowledged that Asperger's syndrome encompasses a very broad range of behavioral traits, from poor motor and social skills to obsession with numbers, computers, and organized structures.

'Maybe I do actually have something like that,' Stallman says. 'On the other hand, one of the symptoms of Asperger's syndrome is difficulties with a sense of rhythm. But I can dance. Furthermore, I enjoy following the most complex rhythms. Overall, one cannot say for sure.' It could be a matter of a certain gradation of Asperger's syndrome that largely fits within the bounds of normality.

Dan Chess, however, does not share the desire to diagnose Richard at this time. 'I have never thought that he is truly abnormal in a medical sense,' he says, 'he was just very detached from other people and their problems, quite unsociable, but if that's the case - then we all were like that, to some extent.'

Alice Lippman finds all the debates surrounding Richard's mental disorders quite amusing, although she remembers a couple of stories that could support the 'for' arguments. A typical symptom of autistic disorders is intolerance to noise and bright colors, and when Richard was a baby and was taken to the beach, he would start crying two or three blocks away from the ocean. Only later did they realize that the sound of the waves was causing him pain in his ears and head. Another example: Richard's grandmother had bright flaming red hair, and every time she leaned over the crib, he would scream as if in pain.

In recent years, Lippman has read a lot about autism and often catches herself thinking that her son's traits are not random quirks. 'I'm really starting to think that Richard might have been an autistic child,' she says, 'it's a pity that so little was known and said about it at the time.'

However, according to her, over time Richard began to adapt. At the age of seven, he loved to stand by the front window on the subway trains to study the labyrinth of tunnels beneath the city. This hobby clearly contradicted his intolerance to noise, which was abundant in the subway. 'But the noise only shocked him at first,' Lippman recounts, 'then Richard's nervous system learned to adapt under the influence of his strong desire to explore the metro.'

In his early years, Richard registered as a completely normal child in his mother's eyes – his thoughts, actions, and communication patterns were like those of an ordinary little boy. It was only after a series of dramatic events in the family that he became withdrawn and detached.

The first such event was his parents' divorce. Although Alice and her husband tried to prepare their son for this and soften the blow, nothing worked. 'It was as if he completely missed all our conversations,' Lippman recalls, 'and then reality just hit him hard when we moved to another apartment. The first thing Richard asked then was: 'Where are Dad's things?'

From that moment began a ten-year period of life split between two families, during which Stallman would spend weekends moving from his mother in Manhattan to his father in Queens. The personalities of his parents were starkly different, and their approaches to parenting were similarly divergent, often in disagreement with each other. Family life was so bleak that Richard still doesn't wish to think about having children of his own. Remembering his father, who passed away in 2001, he feels mixed emotions – he was a tough and stern man, a veteran of World War II. Stallman respects him for his high sense of responsibility and duty – for instance, his father learned French well because it was necessary for combat missions against the Nazis in France. On the other hand, Richard had reasons to be angry with his father, as he often resorted to harsh disciplinary methods.

"My father had a difficult temperament," says Richard, "he never yelled, but he always found a way to systematically and coldly critique everything you said or did."

Stallman describes his relationship with his mother unequivocally: "It was war. It got to the point where, when I told myself 'I want to go home,' I envisioned some unreal place, a fairytale haven of tranquility that I could only see in my dreams."

For the first few years after his parents' divorce, Richard sought refuge with his paternal grandparents. "When I was with them, I felt love and tenderness, and I completely calmed down," he recalls, "that was my only favorite place until I went to college." When he was 8, his grandmother passed away, and just two years later, his grandfather followed suit; this was the second devastating blow from which Richard struggled to recover for a long time.

"This truly traumatized him," says Lippman. Stallman was very attached to his grandparents. It was after their deaths that he transformed from a sociable instigator into a detached silent observer, always standing somewhat apart.

Richard himself considers his withdrawal at that time purely a developmental phenomenon, a time when childhood ends and much is rethought and reevaluated. He refers to his teenage years as "a complete nightmare" and says he felt deaf and mute in a crowd of incessantly chattering music lovers.

“I constantly caught myself thinking that I didn’t understand what everyone around me was talking about,” he describes his sense of alienation. “I was so out of touch with life that I could only grasp individual words in their stream of slang. But I had no desire to delve into their conversations; I couldn’t even comprehend how they could be interested in all those musical artists who were popular at the time.”

Yet there was something beneficial and even pleasant in this alienation—it nurtured a sense of individuality in Richard. While his classmates were eager to grow long hair, he continued to sport a neat, short haircut. When the teenagers around him were going wild over rock and roll, Stallman listened to classical music. A devoted fan of science fiction, the magazine Mad and late-night television shows, Richard never even considered keeping up with everyone else, which only deepened the misunderstanding between him and those around him, including his own parents.

“And those puns!,” exclaims Alice, stirred by memories of her son’s teenage years. “You couldn’t get through a meal without him twisting and turning a phrase back to you, turning it into something unrecognizable.”

Outside of family, Stallman saved his jokes for adults who appreciated his unique gifts. One of the first such people in his life was a counselor at a summer camp who let him read the IBM 7094 computer manual. Richard was about 8 or 9 at the time. For a child passionately interested in mathematics and computer science, it was a true godsend. It wasn’t long before Richard was writing programs for the IBM 7094, though only on paper, never hoping to run them on a real computer. He was simply fascinated by the preparation of a sequence of instructions to accomplish a task. When he ran out of his own programming ideas, Richard began to seek them from the counselor.

The first personal computers didn't appear until ten years later, so Stallman would have to wait many years to work on a computer. However, fate provided him with a chance: in his senior year of high school, the New York IBM Scientific Center offered Richard a task to create a program - a preprocessor for PL/1 that would add tensor algebra capabilities to the language. "At first, I wrote this preprocessor in PL/1, and then I rewrote it in assembly language because the compiled program in PL/1 ended up being too large and wouldn't fit in the computer's memory," recalls Stallman.

In the summer, when Richard graduated from high school, the IBM Scientific Center invited him to work. The first task assigned to him was to develop a numerical analysis program in Fortran. Stallman wrote it in a few weeks and simultaneously grew to hate Fortran so much that he vowed never to touch the language again. He spent the rest of the summer writing a text editor in APL.

At the same time, Stallman worked as a lab assistant in the biology department at Rockefeller University. Richard's analytical mind greatly impressed the lab head, who expected brilliant work from Stallman in biology. A couple of years later, when Richard was already attending college, a phone call rang through Alice Lippman's apartment. "It was that professor from Rockefeller, the lab head," Lippman recounts, "he wanted to know how my son was doing. I said that Richard was working with computers, and the professor was very surprised. He thought Richard was already building a career in biology."

The power of Stallman's intellect impressed the instructors in the Columbia program, even when it began to irritate them. "Usually, once or twice during a lecture, they would make mistakes, and Stallman would always correct them," recalls Braidbart, "thus grew both respect for his intellect and dislike for Richard himself."

Stallman smiles slightly at the mention of Braidbart's words. "Sometimes I did behave like a jerk, " he admits, "but in the end, it helped me find kindred spirits among the teachers who also enjoyed learning new things and refining their knowledge. Students usually didn't allow themselves to correct the instructor. At least, not that openly."

Communication with advanced peers on Saturdays made Stallman consider the benefits of social relationships. College was rapidly approaching, and he needed to choose where to study. Like many participants in the Columbia Program for Natural Science Achievements, Stallman narrowed his list of desired universities to two – Harvard and MIT. Hearing that her son was seriously contemplating applying to an Ivy League school, Lippman became worried. At 15, Stallman continued to clash with teachers and officials. The previous year, he had received top grades in American history, chemistry, mathematics, and French, but English stood out with a failing mark – Richard continued to ignore written assignments. Many universities, including MIT, could overlook this, but not Harvard. Stallman was intellectually suited for this university but did not meet its discipline requirements.

The therapist who noticed Richard's antics in junior high suggested he try a trial version of university education, specifically – a full year in any school in New York without bad grades and disputes with teachers. So, until the fall, Stallman attended summer classes focused on humanities, and then returned to his senior class at West 84th Street. He had a tough time, but Lippman proudly shares that her son managed to get through it.

‘He bent somewhat,’ she says, ‘I was only called once because of Richard – he constantly pointed out inaccuracies in proofs to the math teacher. I asked: ‘Well, is he at least right?’. The teacher replied: ‘Yes, but otherwise, many won’t understand the proof.’

By the end of the first semester, Stallman scored 96 in English, top marks in American history, microbiology, and an advanced math course. He even scored 100 out of 100 in physics. He was at the top of the class academically, yet still an outsider in his personal life.

Richard eagerly continued to attend extracurricular activities, and his work in the biology lab also brought him joy, causing him to pay little attention to what was happening around him. On his way to Columbia University, he moved swiftly and calmly through crowds of pedestrians and demonstrations against the Vietnam War alike. One day, he attended an informal gathering of classmates from the Columbia program. Everyone was discussing the best universities to apply to.

As Brydbar recalls: "Of course, most students aimed for Harvard and MIT, but some chose other Ivy League schools. Then someone asked Stallman where he would apply. When Richard replied that he was going to Harvard, everyone went quiet for a moment and exchanged glances. Richard, however, smiled just a little, as if to say, 'Yes, yes, we are not done with each other yet!'".

Source: linux.org.ru