Free as in Freedom in Russian: Chapter 1. Fatal Printer
Free as in Freedom in Russian: Chapter 2. 2001: Hacker Odyssey
Portrait of a hacker in his youth
Alice Lippman, mother of Richard Stallman, still remembers the moment when her son showed his talent.
“I think it happened when he was 8 years old,” she says.
It was 1961 outside. Lippman recently divorced and became a single mother. With her son, she moved into a tiny one-bedroom apartment located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. This is where she spent her day off. Flipping through Scientific American, Alice stumbled upon her favorite column, Math Games by Martin Gardner. At the time, she was a substitute art teacher, and Gardner's puzzles were great for brainwashing. Sitting on the couch next to her son, who was reading a book, Alice took on the puzzle of the week.
“I wasn’t a puzzle solver,” Lippmann admits, “but for me, as an artist, they were useful in that they trained the intellect and made it more flexible.”
Only today all her attempts to solve the problem were shattered, as if against a wall. Alice was about to throw the magazine away in her hearts, when she suddenly felt that her sleeve was tugged lightly. It was Richard. He asked if help was needed.
Alice looked at her son, then at the puzzle, then back at her son, and expressed her doubt that he could be of any help. “I asked if he had read the magazine. He replied: yes, I read it, and even solved the puzzle. And he begins to explain to me how it is solved. This moment is engraved in my memory for the rest of my life.”
After listening to her son's decision, Alice shook her head - her doubt turned into outright disbelief. “Well, I mean, he was always a smart and capable boy,” she says, “but that was the first time I encountered a manifestation of such an unexpectedly developed mindset.”
Now, 30 years later, Lippmann recalls this with a laugh. “Honestly, I didn’t even really understand his decision, either then or later,” says Alice, “I was just impressed that he knew the answer.”
We are sitting at the dinner table in the spacious three-bedroom Manhattan apartment that Alice and Richard moved here in 1967 when she married Maurice Lippmann. Remembering her son's early years, Alice exudes the typical pride of a Jewish mother mixed with embarrassment. From here you can see a sideboard with large photographs of Richard with a bushy beard and in academic robes. Photos of Lippman'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 then said to me: 'You know what, mom? This is the first prom I've been to."
Such remarks reflect the charge of humor, which is vital for the education of a child prodigy. You can be sure that for every known story about Stallman's stubbornness and eccentricity, his mother can tell a dozen more.
“He was an ardent conservative,” she says, waving her hands in pictorial annoyance, “we are even used to listening to furious reactionary rhetoric at dinner. The other teachers and I were trying to start our own union, and Richard was very angry with me. He perceived trade unions as breeding grounds for corruption. He also fought against social security. He believed that it would be much better if people began to provide for themselves through investment. Who knew that in some 10 years he would become such an idealist? I remember his half-sister came up to me one day and said, 'God, who will grow out of him? Fascist?'".
Alice married Richard's father, Daniel Stallman, in 1948, divorced him 10 years later, and has since raised her son almost alone, although his father remained his guardian. Therefore, Alice can rightfully claim that she knows her son's character well, in particular, his obvious aversion to authority. She also confirms his fanatical craving for knowledge. From these qualities she had a hard time. The house has become a battlefield.
“There were even problems with food, it was as if he never wanted to eat at all,” Lippman recalls what happened to Richard from about 8 years old until graduation, “I call him for dinner, and he ignores me, as if he does not hear . Only after the ninth or tenth time did he finally get distracted and pay attention to me. He plunged headlong into his studies, and it was difficult to get him out of there.
In turn, Richard describes those events in a similar way, but gives them a political connotation.
“I loved to read,” he says, “if I was immersed in reading, and my mother told me to go eat or sleep, I just didn’t listen to her. I just didn't understand why they wouldn't let me read. I didn't see the slightest reason why I should do what I was told. In fact, I tried on myself and family relationships everything that I read about democracy and personal freedom. I refused to understand why these principles were not extended to children.”
Richard and at school preferred to follow considerations of personal freedom instead of demands from somewhere above. By the age of 11, he was two steps ahead of his peers, and received a lot of frustration, typical of a gifted child in high school conditions. Shortly after the memorable puzzle-solving episode, Richard's mother began an era of regular arguments and explanations with teachers.
“He completely ignored written work,” Alice recalls the first conflicts, “I think his last work in elementary school was an essay on the history of the use of number systems in the West in the 4th grade.” He refused to write on topics that did not interest him. Stallman, possessing phenomenal analytical thinking, delved into mathematics and exact sciences to the detriment of other disciplines. Some teachers saw this as single-mindedness, but Lippman saw it as impatience and intemperance. The exact sciences were already presented in the program much more widely than those that Richard did not like. When Stallman was 10 or 11 years old, his classmates started a game of some kind of American football, after which Richard came home in a rage. “He really wanted to play, but it turned out that his coordination and other physical skills left much to be desired,” says Lippman, “which made him very angry.”
Angry, Stallman concentrated even more on mathematics and science. Even in these native areas, however, Richard's impatience sometimes created problems. By the age of seven, immersed in algebra textbooks, he did not consider it necessary to be easier in communicating with adults. Once, when Stallman was in middle school, Alice hired a tutor for him in the person of a student at Columbia University. The very first lesson was enough for the student to no longer appear on the threshold of their apartment. “Apparently, what Richard was telling him just didn’t fit in his poor head,” Lippman suggests.
Another favorite memory of his mother is from the early 60s, when Stallman was about seven years old. 2 years have passed since the parents' divorce, Alice and her son moved from Queens to the Upper West Side, where Richard liked to go to the park on Riverside Drive to launch toy model rockets there. Soon the fun turned into a serious, solid activity - he even began to keep detailed records of each launch. Like his interest in mathematical problems, this hobby was not paid much attention until one day, before a massive NASA launch, his mother jokingly asked her son if he wanted to see if the space agency was following his notes correctly.
“He boiled up,” says Lippman, “and all he could say was, 'I haven't shown them my notes yet!' He probably really was going to show something to NASA." Stallman himself does not remember this incident, but says that in such a situation he would be ashamed of himself because there really is nothing to show NASA.
These family anecdotes were the first manifestations of Stallman's characteristic obsession, which has not left him to this day. When the children ran to the table, Richard continued to read in his room. When the kids played football, imitating the legendary Johnny Unitas, Richard pretended to be an astronaut. “I was strange,” Stallman sums up his childhood years in a 1999 interview, “by a certain age, my only friends were teachers.” Richard was not ashamed of his strange features and inclinations, in contrast to his inability to get along with people, which he considered a real disaster. However, both equally led him to alienate from everyone.
Alice decided to give a full green light to her son's hobbies, even though this threatened new difficulties at school. At the age of 12, Richard attended science camps all summer, and with the start of the school year, he began to go to an additional private school. One of the teachers advised Lippman to enroll his son in the Columbia Science Achievement Program, which was developed in New York for gifted middle and high school students. Stallman added the program to his extracurricular activities without objection, and soon he was visiting Columbia University's residential campus every Saturday.
According to Dan Chess, one of Stallman's fellow students at Columbia, Richard stood out even against the background of this bunch of equally obsessed math and science. “Sure, we were all nerds and geeks there,” says Chess, now a professor of mathematics at Hunter College, “but Stallman was clearly out of this world. He was just fucking smart. I know a lot of smart people, but I think Stallman is the smartest person I've ever met."
Programmer Seth Bridbart, also an alumnus of the program, fully agrees. He got on well with Richard because, like him, he was into science fiction and attended conventions. Seth remembers Stallman as a 15-year-old boy in depressing clothes who makes a "terrible impression" on people, especially fifteen-year-olds of the same kind.
“It's hard to explain,” says Bridbart, “it's not like he was completely withdrawn, he was just too obsessed. Richard impressed with his deep knowledge, but his obvious detachment did not add to his attractiveness at all.
Such descriptions are suggestive: is there any reason to believe that epithets like “obsession” and “withdrawal” were hiding what is today considered adolescent conduct disorders? In December 2001 in the magazine Wired published an article titled "The Geek Syndrome", which describes scientifically gifted children with high-functioning autism and Asperger's syndrome. The memoirs of their parents, set out in the article, are in many ways similar to the stories of Alice Lippman. Stallman himself thinks about it. In a 2000 interview for Toronto Star he suggested that he might have "borderline autistic disorder". True, in the article his assumption was inadvertently presented as a certainty
In light of the fact that the definitions of many so-called "conduct disorders" are still very vague, this assumption seems especially realistic. As Steve Silberman, author of the article The Geek Syndrome, noted, American psychiatrists recently recognized that Asperger's syndrome hides a very wide range of behavioral traits, ranging from poor motor and social skills to an obsession with numbers, computers, and ordered structures. .
“Maybe I actually have something like that,” Stallman says. “On the other hand, one of the symptoms of Asperger's syndrome is difficulty with a sense of rhythm. And I can dance. Moreover, I like to follow the most difficult rhythms. In general, it is impossible to say for sure. We can talk about a certain gradation of Asperger's syndrome, which for the most part fits into the framework of normality.
Dan Chess, however, does not share this desire to diagnose Richard now. “I never once had the idea that he was really some kind of crazy, in a medical sense,” he says, “he was just very detached from the people around him and their problems, he was quite unsociable, but if it comes to that, then We've all been like that, in one way or another."
Alice Lippman is generally amused by all this controversy surrounding Richard's mental disorders, although she remembers a couple of stories that can be added to the arguments in favor. An intolerance to noise and bright colors is considered a characteristic symptom of autistic disorders, and when Richard was taken to the beach with him as a baby, he would begin to cry two or three blocks from the ocean. Only later did they guess that the sound of the surf brought him to pain in his ears and head. Another example: Richard's grandmother had bright fiery red hair, and every time she leaned over the cradle, he screamed as if in pain.
In recent years, Lippman has read a lot about autism, and increasingly finds herself thinking that her son's features are not random quirks. “I’m really starting to think that Richard could have been an autistic child,” she says, “it’s a pity that so little was known and talked about at the time.”
However, according to her, over time, Richard began to adapt. At the age of seven, he liked to stand at the front window of subway trains to explore the labyrinths of tunnels under the city. This hobby clearly contradicted his intolerance for noise, which was abound in the subway. “But the noise shocked him only at first,” says Lippmann, “then Richard’s nervous system learned to adapt under the influence of his ardent desire to learn the subway.”
Early Richard was remembered by his mother as a completely normal child - his thoughts, actions, communication patterns were like those of an ordinary little boy. Only after a series of dramatic events in the family did he become withdrawn and aloof.
The first such event was the divorce of parents. Although Alice and her husband tried to prepare their son for this and soften the blow, they did not succeed. “He seemed to have missed all our conversations with him,” recalls Lippman, “and then reality just hit him in the stomach when moving to another apartment. The first thing Richard asked then was, 'Where are daddy's things?'"
From that moment began a ten-year period of living in two families, when Stallman moved for the weekend from his mother in Manhattan to his father in Queens. The characters of the parents differed strikingly, and their approaches to education also differed greatly, not being consistent with each other. Family life was so bleak that Richard still does not want to even think about having his own children. Remembering his father, who died in 2001, he has mixed feelings - he was a rather tough man, a stern man, a veteran of the Second World War. Stallman respects him for the highest responsibility and sense of duty - for example, his father mastered the French language well only because it was required by combat missions against the Nazis in France. On the other hand, Richard had something to be angry with his father for, because he did not skimp on harsh methods of education. .
“My father had a difficult character,” says Richard, “he never screamed, but he always found a reason to smash everything you say or do with cold and detailed criticism.”
Stallman describes the relationship with his mother unambiguously: “It was a war. It got to the point that when I said to myself 'I want to go home', I imagined some unreal place, a fabulous haven of calm that I had only seen in my dreams.
The first few years after the divorce of his parents, Richard was saved by his paternal grandparents. “When I was with them, I felt love and tenderness, and completely calmed down,” he recalls, “it was my only favorite place before I went to college.” When he was 8 years old, his grandmother passed away, and only 2 years later his grandfather followed her, and this was the second hardest blow, from which Richard could not recover for a long time.
“It really traumatized him,” Lippman says. Stallman was very attached to his grandparents. It was after their death that he turned from a sociable ringleader into a detached silent man, always standing somewhere on the sidelines.
Richard himself considers his withdrawal into himself at that time a purely age-related phenomenon, when childhood ends and much is rethought and reevaluated. He calls his teenage years "a complete nightmare" and says he felt deaf and dumb in a crowd of incessantly chatting music lovers.
“I constantly caught myself thinking that I didn’t understand what everyone was talking about,” he describes his aloofness, “I was so behind the times that I perceived only individual words in their stream of slang. But I didn’t want to delve into their conversations, I couldn’t even understand how they could be interested in all these musical performers that were then well-known.
But there was something useful and even pleasant in this aloofness - it brought up individuality in Richard. When classmates strove to grow long tresses on his head, he continued to wear a short, neat hairstyle. When the teenagers around were crazy about rock and roll, Stallman listened to the classics. Devoted fan of science fiction, magazine Mad and late-night TV shows, Richard didn't even think of keeping up with everyone, and this multiplied the misunderstanding between him and those around him, not excluding his own parents.
“And those puns! exclaims Alice, excited by the memories of her son's teenage years, “at dinner, you couldn’t say a phrase that he wouldn’t give it back to you, having beaten and turned the devil into what.”
Outside the family, Stallman kept jokes for those adults who sympathized with his giftedness. One of the first such people in his life was a teacher at a summer camp, who gave him the manual for the IBM 7094 computer to read. Richard was then 8 or 9 years old. For a child with a passion for mathematics and computer science, this was a real gift from God. . It wasn't long before Richard was already writing programs for the IBM 7094, albeit only on paper, not even hoping to ever run them on a real computer. He was simply fascinated by the compilation of a series of instructions for performing some task. When his own ideas for programs ran dry, Richard began to turn to the educator for them.
The first personal computers appeared only 10 years later, so Stallman would have to wait for the opportunity to work on a computer for many years. However, fate threw a chance here too: already in the last year of high school, the New York IBM Science Center offered Richard to write a program - a preprocessor for PL / 1, which would add the ability to work with tensor algebra to the language. “I first wrote this preprocessor in PL/1 and then rewrote it in assembly language because the compiled PL/1 program was too big to fit into the computer's memory,” Stallman recalls.
The summer after Richard graduated from high school, the IBM Science Center offered him a job. The first task he was given was a Fortran numerical analysis program. Stallman wrote it in a few weeks, and at the same time he hated Fortran so much that he swore to himself never to touch this language again. He spent the rest of the summer writing a text editor in APL.
At the same time, Stallman worked as a laboratory assistant at the Faculty of Biology at Rockefeller University. Richard's analytical mind greatly impressed the head of the laboratory, and he expected a brilliant job in biology from Stallman. A couple of years later, when Richard was already in college, Alice Lippman's apartment rang. “It was the same professor from Rockefeller, head of the laboratory,” says Lippman, “he wanted to know how my son was doing. I said that Richard works with computers, and the professor was terribly surprised. He thought that Richard was building a career as a biologist with might and main.
The power of Stallman's intellect also impressed the Columbia faculty, even as he began to irritate many. “Usually they got it wrong once or twice in a lecture, and Stallman always corrected them,” recalls Bridbart, “so respect for his intelligence and dislike for Richard himself grew.”
Stallman smiles discreetly at the mention of these words of Bridbart. “Sometimes, of course, I behaved like a jerk,” he admits, “but in the end it helped me find kindred spirits among teachers who also liked to learn new things and refine their knowledge. Students, as a rule, did not allow themselves to correct the teacher. At least not that openly."
Meeting advanced guys on Saturdays made Stallman think about the benefits of social relationships. With college fast approaching and a choice of places to study, Stallman, like so many of the Columbia Science Achievement Program, narrowed down his aspirations to two universities—Harvard and MIT. Hearing that her son was seriously considering going to an Ivy League university, Lippman became worried. At 15, Stallman continued to fight with teachers and officials. A year earlier, he received top marks in American history, chemistry, mathematics and French, but for English he showed off "failed" - Richard continued to ignore written work. All this could be overlooked at MIT and many other universities, but not at Harvard. Stallman was perfectly suited to this university in terms of intelligence, and did not meet the requirements of the discipline at all.
The therapist, who in elementary school drew attention to Richard because of his antics, suggested that he take a trial version of high school education, namely, a full year in any school in New York without bad grades and arguments with teachers. So Stallman took summer liberal arts classes until the fall, and then returned to his senior year at West 84th Street. It was very difficult for him, but Lippman proudly says that his son managed to cope with himself.
“He caved in a bit,” she says. “The only time I got called out was because of Richard—he was constantly pointing out inaccuracies in the proofs to the math teacher. I said, 'Well, is he at least right?' The teacher replied, 'Yes, but otherwise many will not understand the evidence.'"
At the end of his first semester, Stallman scored a 96 in English, top marks in American history, microbiology, and advanced mathematics. In physics, he did score 100 points out of a hundred. He was in the class leaders in academic performance, and still the same outsider in his personal life.
Richard continued to go to extracurricular activities with great pleasure, work in the biological laboratory also brought him pleasure, and he paid little attention to what was happening around him. On his way to Columbia University, he squeezed his way through crowds of passers-by and through demonstrations against the Vietnam War with equal speed and calmness. One day, he went to an informal get-together with fellow Columbia students. Everyone was discussing where to go.
As Bridbard recalls, “Of course, most of the students went to Harvard and MIT, but some went to other Ivy League schools. And then someone asked Stallman where he would go. When Richard answered that he was going to Harvard, everyone somehow calmed down and began to look at each other. Richard, on the other hand, smiled faintly, as if to say: 'Yes, yes, we are not parting yet!'
Source: linux.org.ru