excerpt from Steven Levy's book "Hackers" Appendix A. The Last of True Hackers

Stallman, who liked to be called by his initials, RMS, in tribute to the way he logged on to the computer, used the Hacker Ethic as a guiding principle for his best-known work, an editing program called EMACS which allowed users to limitlessly customize it—its wide-open architecture encouraged people to add to it, improve it endlessly. He distributed the program free to anyone who agreed to his one condition: “that they give back all extensions they made, so as to help EMACS improve. I called this arrangement ‘the EMACS commune,’” RMS wrote. “As I shared, it was their duty to share; to work with each other rather than against.”

EMACS became almost a standard text editor in university computer science departments. It was a shining example of what hacking could produce.

But as the seventies progressed, Richard Stallman began to see changes in his beloved preserve. The first incursion was when passwords were assigned to Officially Sanctioned Users, and unauthorized users were kept off the system. As a true hacker, RMS despised passwords and was proud of the fact that the computers he was paid to maintain did not use them. But the MIT computer science department (run by different people than the AI lab) decided to install security on its machine.

Stallman campaigned to eliminate the practice. He encouraged people to use the “Empty String” password—a carriage return instead of a word. So when the machine asked for your password, you would hit the RETURN key and be logged on. Stallman also broke the computer’s encryption code and was able to get to the protected file which held people’s passwords. He started sending people messages which would appear on screen when they logged onto the system:

I see you chose the password [such and such]. I suggest that you switch to the password “carriage return.” It’s much easier to type, and also it stands up to the principle that there should be no passwords.

“Eventually I got to a point where a fifth of all the users on the machine had the Empty String password,” RMS later boasted.

Then the computer science laboratory installed a more sophisticated password system on its other computer. This one was not so easy for Stallman to crack. But Stallman was able to study the encryption program, and, as he later said, “I discovered that changing one word in that program would cause it to print out your password on the system console as part of the message that you were logging in.” Since the “system console” was visible to anyone walking by, and its messages could easily be accessed by any terminal, or even printed out in hard copy, Stallman’s change allowed any password to be routinely disseminated by anyone who cared to know it. He thought the result “amusing.”

Still, the password juggernaut rolled on. The outside world, with its affection for security and bureaucracy, was closing in. The security mania even infected the holy AI computer. The Department of Defense was threatening to take the AI machine off the ARPAnet network—to separate the MIT people from the highly active electronic community of hackers, users, and plain old computer scientists around the country—all because the AI lab steadfastly refused to limit access to its computers. DOD bureaucrats were apoplectic: anyone could walk in off the street and use the AI machine, and connect to other locations in the Defense Department network! Stallman and others felt that was the way it should be. But he came to understand that the number of people who stood with him was dwindling. More and more of the hard-core hackers were leaving MIT, and many of the hackers who had formed the culture and given it a backbone by their behavior were long gone.