[Interview conducted on the 5th of march 2002 by Jonas ?-berg]

Andrew, first of all, could you tell us what Free Software you've been involved in during the years, besides GNU ed which we will talk more about later?

With a loose definition of `Free', I can list:

• FreeBSD 1.x
• cflow(1)
• floatingpoint.h
• (little stuff that will hopefully one day be worth releasing)

What is your motivation for writing Free Software, and has it changed anything over the years as Free Software has gained more and more popularity?

Free exchange of ideas. Free Software is in the best interests of everyone. That should never change.

If we then turn our attention to GNU ed, which you were involved in from the beginning and continue to maintain. The simple question is; why?

A UNIX root partition without ed? It was just another missing part. And another algorithm taken from the text `Software Tools'.

The last public release of GNU ed was in 1994. Has there been any changes to it since then? Will there every be?

There have been many patches submitted. A new release is expected, in earnest, every year since 1994.

You've been involved in computers in one way or another for many years now. Could you tell us how you got involved in it and what it was that you felt was so interesting about computers?

I obligingly loathed computers as a math student. It was probably a Scientific American article by Tomaso Poggio describing the work of the late David Marr's computational vision group at MIT that got me hooked. Shortly afterward, I spent a summer at MIT's AI labs glued to the screen of a Symbolics Lisp machine, subsisting on Liption's instant noodle soup. That was paradise.

When you're not hacking Free Software, to the extent you do that today, what do you do? What's your current occupation and could you tell us something about that?

I enjoy bicycling and the outdoors, classical guitar, helping my family with the vineyard harvest, astronomy and telescope making. In short, a boring existence.

Last year I was in Taiwan developing a wireless WAN infrastructure. But much of my time is spent doing really mundane work for public good non-profits.

My resume objective: Champion Free UNIX Computing. If the US economy ever turns around, I might try to formalize my consulting services.

If we came looking for you in about five years from now, where would we find you and what would you be up to then?

I enjoyed working with the Taiwanese and have a tremendous respect for their culture. Perhaps I'll be doing (or rather, trying to do) business in a free China.

Or maybe I'll be hacking on a computer algorithm for playing dan-level go.

Anyhow, hacking for sure.

And finally, what kind of computer(s) do you use in your daily work today?

I recently upgraded from an ASUS Pentium II/300MHz system to a dual AMD Athlon. Wow!