it all started thanks to a jammed printer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the late 1970s. Richard M. Stallman, a staff programmer at the university, had written code for the lab’s printer, which was on another floor, to save time by having the machine send a message to the lab’s central computer when the printer got jammed. Eventually the printer was replaced and when Stallman tried to implement the same hack, he found he couldn’t modify the code because it was proprietary information.
