John Walker, Founder of Autodesk, Dies At 74 19
John Walker, the founder of computer-aided design software company Autodesk and co-author of AutoCAD, passed away on February 2nd. He was 74. Consultant and programmer Owen Wengerd shared the news on behalf of John's family (via Scanalyst, a website created by John): It is with great sadness that we announce John's death on Friday, February 2, 2024. He was born in Maryland, USA to William and Bertha Walker, who preceded him in death. John is survived by his wife Roxie Walker and a brother, Bill Walker of West Virginia. Declining to follow in his family tradition of becoming a medical doctor, John attended Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) to pursue a future in astronomy. However, after he discovered the brave new world of computers, he never looked back. John worked at the university's Project Chi (X) computing center where he studied computer science and earned a degree in electrical engineering.
John met Roxie on Thanksgiving Day in 1972, and they married the following year. Roxie and John drove cross-country a few months later for John's new job in California. Eventually he left that first job and worked at various others in the bay area. In late 1976, John designed his own circuit board based on the then-new Texas Instruments TMS9900 microprocessor. This venture became Marinchip Systems, and eventually led to Autodesk. The beginnings of Autodesk are well documented by John himself in The Autodesk File 2.0k and from there John's story is best told by John himself in his prodigious work, which is all methodically organized and available to the public at his website Fourmilab 1.4k.
John met Roxie on Thanksgiving Day in 1972, and they married the following year. Roxie and John drove cross-country a few months later for John's new job in California. Eventually he left that first job and worked at various others in the bay area. In late 1976, John designed his own circuit board based on the then-new Texas Instruments TMS9900 microprocessor. This venture became Marinchip Systems, and eventually led to Autodesk. The beginnings of Autodesk are well documented by John himself in The Autodesk File 2.0k and from there John's story is best told by John himself in his prodigious work, which is all methodically organized and available to the public at his website Fourmilab 1.4k.
Hackers Diet (Score:4, Interesting)
I lost a lot of weight after reading "The Hackers Diet" He was a real help to me.
Re: Hackers Diet (Score:2)
Can highly recommend it, worth a read even if you don't follow all of it. He comes up with tools to measure your progress that will work with any diet you choose.
Re: Hackers Diet (Score:4, Informative)
Could also mention it's free on his website - https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackd... [fourmilab.ch]
He's got a lot of stuff online including a lot of his writing. The Autodesk Files is another interesting book you should read (again, free on his website) where he details the early days of AutoDesk making AutoCAD.
Of course, if you wanted it on hardcopy, i think the only options for those books is used, but at least you can print out your own copy if you need it deadtree.
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Holy shit, that website has FRAMES!
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Yeah, it's an oddly comforting sensation to see a part of the web long gone by. The heady optimism and joy of those early days were potent and infectious. It was a new world, a better world if we would only build it. We've come so far but some days.... some days I miss it more than I should.
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I was hoping to see the Hacker's Diet [fourmilab.ch] mentioned in the comments, so thank you. Appropriately, I also discovered it from a Slashdot comment long ago.
Reading his book and using his website to track my progress worked wonders for me. I lost 60 pounds (more, if you consider muscle mass gained) over 10 years ago and have kept it off. Changed the way I think about food and exercise and I owe him greatly.
One of the best whiskeys (Score:4, Funny)
Great quality and not too expensive. Good for any occasion.
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My guess is he died of sadness (Score:3)
Seeing his company offer his products as cloud app crap.
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He left the company like 30 years ago.
I always disliked AutoCAD. The UI was terrible, it was buggy, and slow.
If you'd had a chance to use AutoCAD in the 90s you wouldn't say that. It was amazingly fast and powerful given the hardware available at that point. The alternative at that time was a t square and set square. If you were rich you could get 'drawing machine' which was just a fancy drawing board. You'd have to learn lots of compass techniques for bisection and I remember doing an exam on drawing an isometric ellipse.
It was a very well designed program in its day. But in some ways it became a victim of its le
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AutoCAD had a odd-even thing going on like Star Trek.
The odd versions were very crap. The even versions were decent.
So there were many people who did AutoCAD R12, it was really solid and was a backbone for the 90s. But I had access to R11 and R13, and they were not so good. R12 hung around a long time.
And I don't think drafting machines were all that expensive especially in the late 80s when it was obvious where the future was headed and engineering firms started dumping their drafting machines in favor of
Programmable Applications (Score:5, Interesting)
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The general idea, i.e. that applications be programmable, is laudable. I'd wish there was some way of making this happen "in principle", I really do. There is actually sci-fi which makes this a reality - a common programming model - but this is not, currently, reality.
Unfortunately, software being what it is as of now, achieving a general solution to this is impossible. ATLAST is no exception to this, being a component targeted at a specific language and system. There are hundreds of such implementations -
Don't say it don't say it don't say it (Score:2)
I'm guessing (Score:2)
that there are hundreds of thousands of people in the world called John Walker.
There is a science fiction author (Rise of Mankind , Legacy war, Liberation war etc)
and there was an olympic middle distance runner in the 70's He was the first to do the mile in under 3 minutes 50 seconds in 1975
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The headline states it was the John Walker who was the founder of Autodesk. It's pretty unambiguous at that point.