:16:01
Well... we had to... to have a complete system,
:16:05
you need to have a kernel, which is the program that
:16:09
allocates resources to all the other programs,
:16:13
you need a compiler, which translates a program
:16:17
from readable source code
that programmers can understand into numbers,
:16:23
mysterious numbers
that the computer can actually run.
:16:29
you need other programs
that go with the compiler to help do this job.
:16:32
you need a debugger.
:16:33
you need a text editor.
:16:35
you need text formatters.
:16:36
you need mailers...
:16:39
you need lots and lots of things.
:16:40
There are hundreds of programs
in a Unix-like operating system.
:16:45
I saw Stallman's announcement.
:16:47
Actually I met him in February of 1987.
:16:51
He came to give a five-day tutorial
on Emacs at our company.
:16:57
And during the day he would explain
:17:00
new ways to think about Emacs
:17:03
and ways to extend it, enhance it,
and to use the Emacs source code
:17:07
uh, for better or worse.
:17:09
But in the evening,
he was busily working on this compiler,
:17:13
and he had not yet released it to the public,
:17:16
so he was uh, being a little bit uh,
careful about
:17:20
who, who got to see the source code.
:17:23
But I was very eager,
and when he first announced it in June,
:17:27
I downloaded it immediately.
:17:29
I, I played with it.
:17:31
I got some, some pointers from him.
:17:34
And when I sent the source code back to him,
:17:36
he was very,
:17:38
uh, actually amazed that how quickly
I was able to ramp up on his technology.
:17:43
Whenever we worked on something
at Stanford or in the university,
:17:44
Whenever we worked on something
at Stanford or in the university,
:17:49
we would get, mostly at the time
:17:52
we were working off machines
from Digital Equipment or Sun, mostly Sun.
:17:57
Whenever we would get a Sun machine,
:17:59
the first thing we would do is
we would spend literally days