The announcement went to a Usenet newsgroup called net.unix-wizards. No company behind it, no funding, no launch. Just a man saying he intended to write a complete Unix-compatible system and give it away, and that he'd start with a C compiler and a text editor, because that's what you need before you can write anything else. That was 1983. I've sat through exchange upgrades with more paperwork and less ambition.
And he called it GNU, which stands for GNU's Not Unix, so to expand the name you have to expand it again, and again. A recursive acronym. I spent thirty years with part numbers that meant something sensible, 3000-type relay, that sort of thing, so I rather admire a man who names his life's work after a joke that never finishes.
He's always insisted on the hard g, too — guh-noo, not the silent one you'd give the animal, which is borrowed from Khoikhoi by way of Dutch. Wendell, the recursion isn't even original to him; that crowd had been doing it for years, but his is the one that stuck.
Wendell, half the pipelines I've ever touched are held together by that compiler and some sed. Data comes down from a spacecraft, gets reduced on a Linux box, and somewhere in there is a text editor a man gave away in 1983 because he needed one first.