(Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan (Royal Institute of Technology))
Stockholm, Sweden
Arranged by the student society
“Datorföreningen Stacken”
30 October 1986
[Note: This is a slightly edited transcript of the talk. As such it contains false starts, as well as locutions that are natural in spoken English but look strange in print. It is not clear how to correct them to written English style without ‘doing violence to the original speech’.]
It seems that there are three things that people would like me to talk about. On the one hand I thought that the best thing to talk about here for a club of hackers, was what it was like at the MIT in the old days. What made the Artificial Intelligence Lab such a special place. But people tell me also that since these are totally different people from the ones who were at the conference Monday and Tuesday that I ought to talk about what’s going on in the GNU project and that I should talk about why software and information can not be owned, which means three talks in all, and since two of those subjects each took an hour it means we’re in for a rather long time. So I had the idea that perhaps I could split it in to three parts, and people could go outside for the parts they are not interested in, and that then when I come to the end of a part I can say it’s the end and people can go out and I can send Jan Rynning out to bring in the other people. (Someone else says: “Janne, han trenger ingen mike” (translation: “Janne, he doesn’t need a mike”)). Jan, are you prepared to go running out to fetch the other people? Jmr: I am looking for a microphone, and someone tells me it is inside this locked box. Rms: Now in the old days at the AI lab we would have taken a sledgehammer and cracked it open, and the broken
— source gnu.org | Richard Stallman