Summary: Dr. Richard Stallman, the Free Software Foundation's founder, explains what programs he developed in the eighties

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(intro music)

Roy: Which was the first GNU project or GNU program, officially?

RMS: The first one to be released, you mean?

Roy: Yeah.

RMS: I believe it was GNU Emacs. There were other programs written before then but they weren't really worth distributing. For instance, I wrote rm and ls and cp, but I didn't

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see that anyone would care about them by themselves. So I didn't release them. Those were ways I got used to writing programs to run on UNIX and thus to be part of the system like UNIX. The first GNU program I worked on was Bison. Now, I didn't start from zero. Bison was basically running but it didn't have many of the features that Yacc had and for it to really do its job as a replacement for Yacc it needed

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all those features. So I added those features, and some more. And I did that first because I wanted to use it to write the C front-end for our compiler.