Comment by bitwize
5 years ago
Stallman decided to reimplement Unix because it was popular, not because it was somehow better suited to the hardware.
One of the first GNU programs he released was indeed his "system running Lisp"; it was called Emacs.
This is not the complete picture. Stallman decided to reimplement Unix because it had a combination of popularity and technical merit.
For instance, MS-DOS had a larger installed base than Unix at the time, but ... enough said about that, right?
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, as the saying goes.
A hacker like RMS isn't going to pour years of coding into making a C compiler, and Unix utilities, in his spare time, if he thinks those technologies do not have merit.