"My father had a horrible temper," Stallman says. "He never screamed, but he always found a way to criticize you in a cold, designed-to-crush way."
As for life in his mother's apartment, Stallman is less equivocal. "That was war," he says. "I used to say in my misery, `I want to go home,' meaning to the nonexistent place that I'll never have."
For the first few years after the divorce, Stallman found the tranquility that eluded him in the home of his paternal grandparents. Then, around age 10 his grandparents passed away in short succession. For Stallman, the loss was devastating. "I used to go and visit and feel I was in a loving, gentle environment," Stallman recalls. "It was the only place I ever found one, until I went away to college."
Lippman lists the death of Richard's paternal grandparents as the second traumatic event. "It really upset him," she says. He was very close to both his grandparents. Before they died, he was very outgoing, almost a leader-of-the-pack type with the other kids. After they died, he became much more emotionally withdrawn."
From Stallman's perspective, the emotional withdrawal was merely an attempt to deal with the agony of adolescence. Labeling his teenage years a "pure horror," Stallman says he often felt like a deaf person amid a crowd of chattering music listeners.
"I often had the feeling that I couldn't understand what other people were saying," says Stallman, recalling the emotional bubble that insulated him from the rest of the adolescent and adult world. "I could understand the words, but something was going on underneath the conversations that I didn't understand. I couldn't understand why people were interested in the things other people said."
For all the agony it produced, adolescence would have a encouraging effect on Stallman's sense of individuality. At a time when most of his classmates were growing their hair out, Stallman preferred to keep his short. At a time when the whole teenage world was listening to rock and roll, Stallman preferred classical music. A devoted fan of science fiction, Mad magazine, and late-night TV, Stallman cultivated a distinctly off-the-wall personality that fed off the incomprehension of parents and peers alike.
"Oh, the puns," says Lippman, still exasperated by the memory of her son's teenage personality. "There wasn't a thing you could say at the dinner table that he couldn't throw back at you as a pun."
Outside the home, Stallman saved the jokes for the adults who tended to indulge his gifted nature. One of the first was a summer-camp counselor who handed Stallman a print-out manual for the IBM 7094 computer during his 12th year. To a preteenager fascinated with numbers and science, the gift was a godsend.Stallman, an atheist, would probably quibble with this description. Suffice it to say, it was something Stallman welcomed. See previous note 1: "As soon as I heard about computers, I wanted to see one and play with one." By the end of summer, Stallman was writing out paper programs according to the 7094's internal specifications, anxiously anticipating getting a chance to try them out on a real machine.
With the first personal computer still a decade away, Stallman would be forced to wait a few years before getting access to his first computer. His first chance finally came during his junior year of high school. Hired on at the IBM New York Scientific Center, a now-defunct research facility in downtown Manhattan, Stallman spent the summer after high-school graduation writing his first program, a pre-processor for the 7094 written in the programming language PL/I. "I first wrote it in PL/I, then started over in assembler language when the PL/I program was too big to fit in the computer," he recalls.