> What Stallman did a decade later was great if you happened to have access to the type of computer that could run Emacs. Even then, you probably didn't own the machine and maybe even had to pay for time on it by the hour. The small machines that ran Microsoft Basic were in people's homes.

No, a decade later was at the end of the 1980's. At that time, many middle class families could afford home computers like the Atari ST, which could run many of the GNU compilers/tools.

It was a great learning experience porting Unix apps and games to the ST.