As the FSF's first full-time paid employee, Tower mostly performed administrative tasks, including managing mailing lists, newsgroups and requests for information. In 1986, Tower assisted
Richard Stallman with Stallman's initial plan to base the C compiler for the GNU Project on the
Pastel compiler Stallman had obtained from Lawrence Livermore Lab. Tower worked on rewriting the existing code from Pastel, a variation of
Pascal, into C acknowledging others' contributions, including Tower's, who "wrote parts of the parser,
RTL generator, RTL definitions, and of the Vax machine description" based on ideas contributed by Jack Davidson and Christopher Fraser. Along with Mike Haertel, David Hayes and Stallman, Tower was also one of the initial co-authors of GNU
diff, a file comparison utility based on a published algorithm by
Eugene Myers. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Tower spoke at
USENIX conferences as a representative of the FSF. == League for Programming Freedom ==