Most likely that photo would have been on film in 2002. Shoot it, then wait to shoot all the pictures on the roll, bring the roll to a shop, get the prints, either scan the screenshot or mail it, with a stamp. A Polaroid would cut most of the wait time to zero. Anyway, still a lot of trouble compared to a few years later.

By the way, I think RMS doesn't have a mobile phone even now. Somebody's else could have taken a picture for him. Phones with cameras were not common back then because what would you do with it on GSM?

Maybe not... Digital cameras were well-established in 1998.

I bought one around that time (Olympus I think, sub-1MP), and used a script on Linux to extract the images. I was not a terribly early adopter.