Outside the classroom, Stallman pursued his studies with even greater diligence, rushing off to fulfill his duties as a lab assistant at Rockefeller University during the week and dodging the Vietnam protesters on his way to Saturday classes at Columbia. It was there, while the rest of the Science Honors Program students sat around discussing their college choices, that Stallman finally took a moment to join in the pre-class chat.
Seated at the dining-room table in her second Manhattan apartment—the same spacious three-bedroom apartment where she and her son moved after her 1967 marriage to Maurice Lippman, now deceased—Alice Lippman exudes a Jewish mother’s mixture of pride and amusement as she recalls her son’s early years. The nearby dining-room sideboard displays an 8-by-10-inch photo of Stallman looking stern, with a full beard and doctoral robes. The image dwarfs the accompanying photos of Lippman’s nieces and nephews, but before a visitor can read too much into it, Lippman is quick to balance its prominent placement with an ironic quip.
With no dorm and no desire to return to New York, Stallman followed in the footsteps of Greenblatt, Gosper, Sussman, and the many other hackers who had come before him. After enrolling at MIT as a graduate student, Stallman rented an apartment in nearby Cambridge but soon came to regard the AI Lab itself as his de facto home.