RMS could have taken a photo of his screen, or done something cheeky like dump his screen to a padded ASCII text file and submitted that. Stick in the mud.
replies(9):
1. He was using a virtual console (ie. what you get when you press Ctrl-Alt-F1 and similar if using X), not an X terminal.
2. The virtual console was very likely not using a framebuffer (which would be a graphics mode), but was in fact just the Linux kernel's standard text mode output for virtual consoles, using the BIOS font.
Making a screenshot of such a text mode as a graphics file is actually not really something you can do. For the most part, the best you can do is to synthesize an equivalent image from scratch by rendering the text using another program.
That's likely what he meant when he said that he didn't know how to do a screenshot. Yes, it's overly specific, and the person who asked was probably just wanting to see what he was looking at on the monitor, which wouldnt require an exact pixel-for-pixel copy, but there you go.
You can of course synthesize a new image based on the contents of that text buffer (and that would almost certainly have been fine for the purposes of the question), but you can't dump a graphics buffer that doesn't exist.
He would absolutely have known about script(1).