Ah, yes he did, except he was obstinate about using anything more fancy than email. As I remember it, though, there were a lot of ports of the GNU tools to all the unices, and the PC was still not as good as the Unix workstations. So where's the motivation to make Hurd, you know?

People weren't really clamoring for Hurd or a kernel for GNU, because they got an OS with their computer, and got the GNU tools and libc. The really major geeks would buy old, used workstations, which were built like tanks and were plenty fast for running single-user unix.