John Walker, founder of Autodesk, has died | Hacker News Reader

John Walker, founder of Autodesk, has died

scanalyst.fourmilab.ch

1,072 pointsjdougan227 comments

I was in high school right at the time the first CAD systems came in and our school was the test school for the region. Our older drafting teacher didn't want to learn the new system so he asked the class who knew "computers". I had had Commodore PETs at home for a few years and was teaching myself to code. My hand shot up and I was given full access to the new machine to "figure it out". It was my first introduction to PCs (IBM XT) and of course AutoCAD. I still remember, version 1.17b. I was introduced to LISP in AutoCAD, I ended up partaking in regional training for the other schools when they got their CAD systems, and then into a job working with AutoCAD.

In my 20's I started a company developing engineering and architectural add-ons in LISP for AutoCAD, and while we later transitioned into a general software house, those will always be my roots. John's products changed the direction of my life and I wish I had had the chance to let him know that.

When the school region later deprecated that IBM XT 10 years later the school asked me if I wanted it. Still have it along with the original Kurta tablet and Roland plotter.

That's a really cool story, thank you for sharing

Great story and I can relate. In the late '80's I worked as a summer engineering intern at a civil engineering company. They assigned me to train the crochety draftsmen on AudCAD, but they wanted nothing to do with it. To paint a picture, these guys were hunching over drafting tables using pencils and erasers to draw their drawings, while chain smoking the whole time. An ash tray would be placed on the center of the drawing. Needless to say, my summer project was not a success! :-)

(You inspired me to riff on this and extrapolate, so here goes...)

Great story and I can relate. In the late '20s I worked as an ML intern at a tech company. They assigned me to train the crotchety programmers on prompt engineering, but they wanted nothing to do with it. To paint a picture, these folks were hunching over IDEs using keyboards and mice to type in their code, while cursing at the compiler the whole time. An internal chat/discussion/meme forum would be open on a browser tab on their second monitor. Needless to say, my summer project was not a success! :-)

(Let's revisit this comment of mine in a decade or two, if HN still exists)

I worked at a government agency in the early 90s. We had drafts people. One of the big issues was computer cad took longer and the drawings looked worse. Printing blueprint size was difficult. They drawing were on some wierd “vellum” like semi transparent material so they could make copies in the blueprint room which always smelled like ammonia.

Of course once you had edits the manual drawing speed advantage went away and plotting/printing tech soon caught up. One of the drafts people had a power eraser that would sound a round white eraser tip like a drill.

Re: Amonia Agreed. When I wasn't "teaching" AutoCAD, I was making blueprints on the blueprint machine, which was in a small closet-sized room filled with air that seemed to be 80% ammonia.

Same here, late 80s I took a high school drafting class and asked about the PCs in the back, the teacher said "I don't know anything about them, they have some software called AutoCAD. Do you want to take an elective and learn how it works?" It was entirely 2D and I went through all the exercises quickly.

That foundational knowledge stuck with me and although it's not my job at all, I use Fusion 360 all the time at home to design parts for my self-built microscope and many other things. It's a great tool.

This is a great recollection. I was in high school in the early 80s, and I took engineering drafting because I wanted to be an engineer. It was all manual drawing lines, lettering, figuring out where to center your thing on the paper, no computers. I wonder when my school switched to CAD - I could have just missed your life story! When I got to college I was a CS major and we didn't have to do CAD or blueprints.

bro, i have a question. lisp addon for autocad is the second piece of lisp on automotive software. the first one was mathcad's addon. what's with lisp and automotive software? where and when did lisp slip into it? thanks xoxo

The original AutoCAD was built around AutoLISP [1] (sort of like Emacs), keeping with John Walker's philosophy regarding programmability in software. [2]. MathCAD APIs were much later.

[1] https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/e5/

[2] https://www.fourmilab.ch/atlast/

Generally similar story. I was in college and working part-time for a structural engineering company in the mid 80s as a manual drafter. We got a contract that required drawings be submitted in electronic (DWG) format. Because I was the "young" guy and had taken a couple programming classes, the partners asked if I was willing to learn AutoCAD and become the company's CAD drafter. At the time it was not an obvious yes answer. CAD drafting was not universally accepted as viable and people at my company, and within the industry, considered CAD as the last bastion for incompetent drafters. After I said yes the "old" veteran drafter at the company told me I was wasting my time and making a career mistake. I taught myself Lisp in order to make the most of the opportunity, and now 40 years later, the vast majority of my career has been spent inside AutoCAD, drawing and programming many, many lines of Lisp code.

Another former draftsman here...started a new job at a civil engineering firm and was tasked with learning AutoCAD. Quickly became once of the lead CAD draftsmen in the department, as part of that I picked up AutoLISP scripting to automate a lot of work. I found I liked writing scripts so I took an introductory C programming course; I aced that.

At the same time I was going to college part-time nights as an engineering major, but from my perch as a draftsman I was not really seeing a lot to love about civil engineering. I ran across an ad for a tech support job at a startup CAD software vendor, applied, and got the gig. I quit that drafting job, put away my ink pens and electric eraser, and switched to a computer science major.

The rest is history, now a senior systems software engineer working on projects for NASA. So godspeed John Walker, thanks for pointing me in the direction of a 30+ year career that has been both lucrative and interesting.

I have benefited from his "The Hackers Diet" book - https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/ and his numerous book reviews. He was one of persons who inspired me with his voracious reading habit. It was unbelievable to me first. He also led his life in his own way, with not many knowing that he was the founder of Autodesk. He will remain an inspiration to hackers.

Thanks for sharing this. What a gem !

Wow, yes. I first read it 25-30 years ago, and had no idea who he was. But it's one of the few books that really changed my life.

This past weekend I noticed I've been logging my weight daily on his site (it does a 10 day weighted running average) since 2006. I was thinking of sending him an email thanking him for the help he provided me. So, a strange coincidence. RIP.

Looks nice! Is the science sound?

If you mean The Hacker's Diet, then yes. It's just a way of doing CICO and weight tracking (+ smoothing to avoid demotivating wild fluctuations), so yes.

For hacker's diet?

Yes, but it's very barebones basics of calorie deficit calculations, and do not take into account (very individual) differences across the day.

Actually, on close reading, you realize he's eating one large meal a day and that's it. This is actually intermittent fasting "before it was cool".

Yes, but it's not articulated in detail why and how it works.

It's a good start, and for many it will help - hell, it did help me just by putting it down in clear numbers that ultimately calorie deficit is the crucial thing.

> it's not articulated in detail why and how it works

Answering that is a very long and fascinating deep dive in human biology with plenty of unknowns. I wouldn't even try to summarise as I myself am nowhere near knowledgeable enough on the topic. For myself, I've noticed that maintaining a calorie deficit is simply easier if it's a regular meal and then no meal than if it's two half meals.

I can go for days without eating and not think about it too much - but as soon as I start eating, I become obsessed with food and cannot stop. So if I just eat dinner, there's not enough time left in the day to overeat.

That's why it works for me.

You might like this talk fwiw: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RuOvn4UqznU

Reduction of meal count definitely helps in maintaining caloric deficit, and even more if like me, you're insulin-resistant.

Trying to do classic '5 meals a day', no matter their size, ensured I'd end up with completely out of whack blood sugar driving me into cravings that ensured there was no weight loss, but weight gain.

It helped me a lot too. Rest in peace, John.

I saw his article on reversing myopia and followed his advice to this day; I hope he doesn't mind me sharing his suggestions!

"I think the next time I go for new glasses, I'll skip the progressives (which are extremely expensive) and just get reading/computer and driving glasses, each fixed-corrected to the appropriate distance. This will probably cut the cost in half, and I find that when I'm travelling and wearing the progressives, I usually just push them down my nose to read rather than trying to read through the lower part, which is pretty wonky (this may have something to do with my astigmatism correction)."

amazing human taking time answering rando emails from the internet. world would be infinitely better with more like him.

The world's changed since then. If you go to the right online glasses providers, you can get progressives for much less (<half) than the cost of a pair of single power glasses in a high street store.

True but some of what he says still makes sense.

i.e. I'm near sighted now (need reading glasses) and have astigamatism (I've always had that but until I needed reading glasses I never bothered with glasses so my brain has adapted, if I wear lenses that correct for the astigmatism everything looks the wrong shape for quite a while before eyes adjust then when I don't wear them everything looks the wrong shape but the other way so in the end I just went for glasses for close vision work (screen/reading) since that was less bothersome than "fixing" a problem that isn't really a problem).

I'm in the same situation. Astigmatism and really mild myopia all my life (got glasses but never really used them).

My eyes got really tired a year ago and I got glasses for short distances. But now they got much worse and I think I'll have to order new lenses.

I was thinking about progressives but it looks like a lot of people have issues adapting. Since my myopia continues low, I think I'll just focus on the reading glasses for now.

Any advice welcome.

I got dramatical improvement in my myopia over a few months time when I switched to a Paleo-ish diet, drastically cutting sugar and supplementing with vitamins including luteine.

I no longer needed my glasses to drive or go to the movies. Granted it was only -1 but still.

Now a decade on, my diet isn't so clean any more, far away details are somewhat blurry but still better than they used to be. The biggest impact is the amount of sleep I had the night before.

Progressive's are the highest margin lens for both the retail store and the manufacturers (Essilor, Zeiss, Hoya, Rodenstock, etc). By putting a fancy curve on the back of a lens a $1 piece of plastic is transformed into a $500 piece of plastic. There is a lot of pressure to sell progressives. Without the high margins on progressive lenses many optical retail stores would not make a profit.

Progressives are fine as long as they aren't being sold as a lens for all situations. For example a lens that would be good for driving or playing golf (using mostly distance vision) would be terrible for sitting at a desk (using mostly the reading area). Depending on your lifestyle there may or may not be a design available that is less annoying than just changing glasses. Bifocals are even more limited in this respect. This trade-off is not related at all to the issue of adaptation which is something else.

So the first question you have to ask is if having both a distance and reading Rx in the same lens is something that is better for you compared to separate distance and reading glasses. My monitors are at head height so simple reading glasses are the best solution for me when working at my desk. If I wore progressives with this setup I would have to tilt my head back in order to view my monitors through the reading area of the lens which is at the bottom of the lens. If I instead worked on a notebook computer all day, looking down at a screen, then viewing that screen through the reading area of my glasses wouldn't be a problem.

I'm currently wearing a pair of fancy fully personalised progressives that retail for £2000 a pair but I still use some cheapish reading glasses for working at my desk. However to be fair to the progressives I adapted to them just about instantly; the design just wasn't suited for reading for long periods of time.

The adaptation issue is another issue and another thing you should consider. Adaptation refers to the ability to become accustomed to the distortion that often exists at the edges of progressive lenses. They can make you feel a bit dizzy when you first wear them. The general rule of thumb is that if you have a small "add" then it will be easy to adapt to them but if you have a large add it may be difficult.

If your add is small now and don't see the point of progressives but are thinking of trying them later as your near vision deteriorates you may want to consider starting on them early just to make it easier to adapt to them later. Otherwise you might get stuck with bifocals which make you look old.

Anyway if I had to boil that advice down to just a few quick points I'd say:

- If you're planning on using the glasses just for working at a desk then I would just get reading glasses (that also correct your astigmatism).

- For other situations where you need both distance and reading then progressives can be nice.

- If you're not quite sure about progressives but think you'll definitely want them later in life then it is better to start on them now.

- If you're buying online I would only get single vision lenses. To get a nice fit for progressives you need to get a bunch of stuff measured that doesn't get put on your prescription.

It also depends on how old you are and how bad your presbyopia is (the condition where it's hard to flex your lenses and so change focus from near to far). Progressives are great if you do have this condition - I have a Costco membership largely to get cheaper glasses for this reason...

Is that 2000 British pounds sterling? That seems high? In the US I paid $300 for glasses with progressive lenses and my eye insurance covered the whole cost -- Many US eye insurance carriers pay for a new pair of glasses aevery two years. My progressives work fine and it only takes about 1 day to adjust to them.

Yes they are that expensive (although I didn't pay anything for them). The price you paid is definitely more typical. I adapted to mine quickly too I just don't like them very much.

I got progressives a few months ago - going back to reading glasses

What options do you use? I know about Zennit but I always wondered if there is something better, as my progresive are very expensive.

Zeiss & Hoya make good lenses. Both also have expertise in photography equipment and they have their own coatings, so they're also a plus. Their lenses might not come cheap, though.

I also used Japanese Tora and French Essilor Crizal lenses (cylindrical, not progressives), and they had good resolution with superb coatings.

Currently I'm using a domestic lens with blue filter, and my eyes are happier than ever.

My mother uses progressives. A bad progressive is a life quality reducing expense, so paying the price for a good lens pays in dividends over the short and long run.

> What options do you use?

Last two sets of glasses I got were progressives from zennioptical.com. You have to be happy to fit the glasses yourself (worked okay for me), but I've been happy with the quality of the hardware and the quality of vision and fit. The last pair I bought was in 2020 and I'm still wearing them all the time. All up cost was US$108 including frames with progressive lenses, high refractive index plastic, oleophobic coating and delivery. I'm about -6 with an astigmatism in both eyes.

>I saw his article on reversing myopia

Where did you see it? I'd like to read it too.

it's here! https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/health/myopia/

In the end he recommends if you need cataract surgery, i.e. a lens replacement, to get a lens focused at reading distance. Note that there is progress being made on accommodating implantable ocular lenses (also called variable-focus) which can shift their focus similar to your natural lens. I'm personally keeping an eye out on these guys https://ocumetics.com/ .

thanks

This is interesting, I'm going through an internal debate about what type of lense to go with for cataract surgery. The latest progressive lenses or just correct for distance and wear reading glasses for close in work. I've come to the same conclusion, better to go with single lense, rather than the progressives.

Progressives just don't make sense to me. I have a pair of computer glasses, and a pair of bike riding glasses, and I never ride my bike while using the computer. So why would I want to have 50% of my vision blurry at all times?

I got bifocals for driving, so that I could read the gps when necessary. Turns out it's not really very useful because it's hard to "glance" that the gps and get it in the right area of my vision to use the "reading" part of the glasses. I wouldn't do it again. That being said, having the "reading" part of the glasses doesn't negatively impact my using them for distance, so I could see the benefit of the bifocal just so you always have the reading part available without needing a second pair of glasses.

To the best of my knowledge, bifocals are just progressives with a distinct line where the prescription changes; instead of having an area where it "transitions". They look archaic (social concerns, if you care about that kind of thing) in exchange for not having a whole area of the lens that isn't usable at all.

>> amazing human taking time answering rando emails from the internet.

Life tip: Most people will do that if your email is about something they are interested in and (most importantly) they have time. Celebrities are usually off the table (no time for all the fan email), but this guy is "just" a retired engineer who made a big product and a lot of money. You were also asking about some side interest of his, so I would almost expect a response.

Be polite and fairly concise (brief, they don't need your life story out the gate) on a topic of interest to them and most people will respond positively.

>and (most importantly) they have time.

>is "just" a retired engineer who made a big product and a lot of money.

Gernerally those 2 go hand in hand. You make something well known and they get dozens of emails a day about advice, business deals, the usual spam, and more.

I’m curious about how long have you been trying out his advice and if you have seen any improvements in your prescription?

just over 10yrs and my prescription used to get steadily worse due to the 20/20 power yet I stare at the screen (arms length) a lot. I was -4.75 and is now -4.25 I'm just happy it didn't progress into -10 arena. I have 3 pairs of glasses one for everyday (short distance), one for driving, and one sunglasses also for driving.

I lost weight thanks to trendweight and his 'The Hackers Diet' method of weight loss.

I had written him down as potential podcast guest, skimmed through some of his autodesk diaries and just never gotten around to reaching out to him.

Man, that sucks.

If you want to do his diet: get a smart scale and use TrendWeight. It doesn't tell you what to eat, but gives better data about whether you are on track or not then anything else I've seen. You weigh yourself daily, but only pay attention to a moving average and a future projection. That smooths out all noise in a scale measurement.

It uses an Exponential Moving Average, which I suspect is the real innovation. That smooths out the daily data with the longer term trends.

https://trendweight.com/

That's interesting, I designed essentially the same system, which I have used several times to get my weight back in range. The 7-day moving average is what I pay attention to. It has fields for notes on food eaten, exercise, and alcohol. The idea is to let the feedback of the data influence my behavior, rather than being prescriptive.

I knew it couldn't possibly be completely original, but it's cool to hear whose thoughts mine shadowed.

Yeah, averages are super helpful.

I wish my smart scale could pull the data from trendweight and just say "above" or "below". With the Hackers Diet that is all that matters is whether you are above or below the trend line.

If you haven't heard of it, maybe give MacroFactor a look (not affiliated, just a happy user). It is the only food log and weight tracker that I've used with success. On the weight tracking side, it also requires daily weigh-ins and tracks your trend weight over time. Combining that with the calories you log, it determines your TDEE and adjusts your calories and macros from week to week depending on the goal you want to achieve.

https://macrofactorapp.com/

Very cool. I'll check it out.

The limitation, but also the real benefit of the Trend Weight is there is no tracking of food. Each day you can see if you are above or below the trend line and how many calories you are above or below where you need to be.

It's just the diff, basically.

Takes me back.

One of my earliest "big" gigs for good money was a mid 80's use of the newly released AutoLisp(?) to generate non standard (for the day) engineering forms for computational analysis.

The architects made a bit of a wild sketch for a big international mega millions build contract, the engineering crowd made it work - the architects got a fancy award, we got a thank you bread and cheese thing with drinks.

(And paid .. that counts.)

R.I.P. John Walker - https://www.fourmilab.ch/evilempire/

This is a little bit weird: https://www.fourmilab.ch/evilempire/noEU/

Perhaps, but certainly consistent. John was famously not a fan of large government, be it the USSR, the USofA, or the EU - a believer in small government and prepared to sell merch to just that end.

What's weird about having strong opinions about the European Union?

I guess it's tongue in cheek, and it is funny, but some of what is written is a bit weird.

"anti-democratic ... empire at the expense of the natural rights, individual liberty, local autonomy, and cultural diversity which made Europe the wellspring of Western civilisation."

Firstly, I wouldn't call Mesopotamia and the eastern Med Europe exactly.

Secondly, lot of cultural and scientific advances that did happen in Europe were under (among others) the Roman, Holy Roman, British and Spanish Empires, which are exactly what he is against!

It's also weird that he thinks the EU "began to sprout" in 2003, a decade after Maastrict.

Is Mesopotamia typically considered the “west?”

Latin and Greek are both successors to the Phoenician alphabet. The Phoenicians settled parts of modern day Europe and brought their alphabet and other technologies that they inherited from Mesopotamian civs. The Greeks would have been nowhere without Babylonian maths and astrology.

West and East is very grey though. I've made a distinction that I'm happy with, and pointed out why I'm not happy with John's.

What do you think?

could not tell if this was satire or not. interesting fella

It seems like satire today given what's happened in the last 10 years but given it was published 2003, he was well ahead of the times and possibly writing with tongue in cheek, even if he did believe the thrust of it

His story of the beginnings of Autodesk (“The Autodesk File”) is very interesting and contains a number of lessons: https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/

This snippet is amazing and hilarious at the same time:

>The game has changed. In 1977 this business was fun—the sellers and buyers were hotshot techies like ourselves, everybody spoke the same language and knew what was going on, and technical excellence was recognised and rewarded. Today, the microcomputer industry is run by middle manager types who know far more about P/L statements than they do RAM organization. They are the people who determine whether you succeed or fail, and their evaluations are seldom based on technical qualities. Hence, the first thing any venture in this field has to be is businesslike.

I felt that way in the early 90s with PCs programming and late 90's with the Internet. Once the "suits" take over, things get boring for us techies.

It's like that saying, "nobody goes there any more. it's too crowded"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yogi_Berra#%22Yogi-isms%22

> Once the "suits" take over, things get boring for us techies.

To be fair, "suits" are a sign of success and growth. Once your company is large enough to be just a single team, and starts requiring too much time to keep track of all things happening and what each employee thinks and does, managing becomes a dedicated job and delegating management requires dedicated managers.

Also, I think that point of view is through rose-colored glasses. One circle of hell is comprised of being managed by an awkward antisocial techie.

Although rare, there are managers who are both technically competent and good at managing people (disparate skillsets). I think a manager who knows nothing about tech is often as destructive as a technical manager who's bad at people management. There just seems to be more of the former

I would say that if someone is supposedly good at people or managing, but bad at tech and therefore bad at managing tech, then they are not good at people or managing.

"One circle of hell is comprised of being managed by an awkward antisocial techie."

And heaven is, competent techies, who know and trust each other and know the mission - and need not being managed.

Right? Do passionate hobbiests really need non-tech managers if they're successful?

Rose or not. The current future of suits letting go of valuable talent to get a 0.2% higher quarterly earnings statement sure doesn't appeal to me. At least if some power hungry techy rants at me there's usually some technical fault I made instead of simply being a pawn on the board. There's nothing to learn or reflect on in a layoff.

This is very much how I feel about the RepRap/3d printing community.

Must be a common pattern in tech.

I've read it at least twice over the years and its descriptions of hard-learned lessons, sales tactics, product decisions, hiring, management structures, internationalization, funding, dealing with partnerships, and chasing and reaching break-even are very much applicable to today's startups. Some paragraphs in the book even sound like PG whispered advice in John's ear but obviously the rise of Autodesk predates YC by decades.

I'd say the odds are good PG had read it. It has been on the Web since the mid 90s.

You noticed my insinuation :-)

john walker :(

he wrote a very interesting c extension language at autodesk called atlast, wrote a diet guide that's made the front page of hacker news countless times, was doing things with neural networks on the commodore 64, had libraries to help make c safe, put some very cool recipes on his website, and also founded some cad company i guess

Edit:

a high-performance version of pg's bayesian spam filter and very long story of the things he tried prior to it: https://fourmilab.ch/annoyance-filter/

neural network code & explainer for c64: https://fourmilab.ch/documents/commodore/BrainSim/

program for knuth-style bible study: https://fourmilab.ch/etexts/www/BibleStrat/

copycat but not clone of a just-short-of-modular synthesizer before that was a thing (the project he was clean-room reimplementing was by harry pyle, designer of the intel 8008 who he knew personally): https://fourmilab.ch/webtools/MindGrenade/

a very good primer on probability & stats, with a great references section: https://fourmilab.ch/rpkp/experiments/statistics.html

massive hypothesis testing via the internet when that was still a relatively new thing: https://fourmilab.ch/rpkp/

one approach to avoiding low-quality content on the internet: https://fourmilab.ch/documents/strikeout/

recipe collection: https://fourmilab.ch/documents/meals/

reverse engineering a weird californian cheese brand: https://fourmilab.ch/chez-nuke/SubMarie/

bending spacetime in the basement: https://fourmilab.ch/gravitation/foobar/

the most succinct introduction to rocket science: https://fourmilab.ch/documents/rocket_science/

smartalloc: eliminating the problem of memory leaks in c: https://fourmilab.ch/smartall/

insanely massive collection of multi-language benchmark results (including an implementation of a raytracer in a range of languages so large it includes algol-60, pl/i & raku)

a post laying out the exact approach spacex took before musk had even started a company: https://fourmilab.ch/documents/rocketaday.html

he's also the guy who wrote xsunclock

* accidentally skipped the link to the insane multi-language (pl/i to raku!) benchmark, even though i mentioned it: https://www.fourmilab.ch/fbench/ffbench.html

> reverse engineering a weird californian cheese brand: https://fourmilab.ch/chez-nuke/SubMarie/

A weird Californian salad dressing brand. His results definitely sound quite enticing!

Wow, I just read https://fourmilab.ch/documents/strikeout/ and I'm stunned. I'd really love to see how other people react to this and whether they agree with his, in my opinion extreme, focus on correct use of language. But sadly, I cannot find any online discussions of this article. Are there perhaps other people that take a similar viewpoint that expand a bit more on why they take such a stance?

Practically, striking out texts at first mistake also seems like such a fundamentally unworkable solution to me. The first glaring problem is that he says you can easily spot the kind of mistakes that non-native English speakers are likely to commit. But to me that's obviously ridiculous unless you have a more than passing familiarity with the structure of all common languages of the world. I'm aware that this was written in 2005, but nowadays the chance that a given piece of writing is written by a native English speaker is certainly less than 50%. And the ones who are skilled at writing English will have reached some plateau where they can easily communicate with anyone. But that will be below a native speaker's level, and going beyond that is a massive time investment that has no practical benefit for them. Other than being able to talk to John Walker I suppose.

Other than that, I'm also not sure how you would even define proper English beyond "what I grew up learning". And given he would "strike" frivolous things like "xp" (The windows operating system) instead of "XP", it stood out to me that he used the term "on-line", a spelling we would "strike" nowadays.

And finally, given the brain's ability to seamlessly decipher even extremely scrambled words, I feel like the ability to even spot slight misspellings in text is something you specifically have to train yourself to be able to do. That seems like the most profound waste of time, to train yourself to spot mistakes in text you'd otherwise not even have noticed and that would've never impacted you.

I emailed him once ( without knowing who he was ) about an issue with his JavaScrypt tool. Super down to earth. His website is so unpretentious I didn't realize he was the founder of Autodesk.

I think this is the JS tool mentioned: https://bigarrow.tripod.com/js-encr/j4jscrypt.html

His main website is really fantastic, well worth a visit: https://www.fourmilab.ch/

Oh that sucks... John was instrumental in the success of ww.com, thanks to him we had speakfreely as the audio layer using the GSM encoder.

His 'digital imprimatur' was as prophetic as much as it is still relevant today, well worth reading:

https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/

And just in case you never came across it:

https://through-the-interface.typepad.com/through_the_interf...

A great interview with him.

Also The Internet Slum https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/netslum/

I remember discovering his website in the mid 90's and immediately falling in love with all the random stuff he had. I had an early laptop back then and took it to my high school astronomy club meetups loaded with his astronomy software. We were able to use it to help us point this giant clunky telescope and immediately I saw what the future would be like with portable computing.

A 2008 interview with John Walker:

https://through-the-interface.typepad.com/through_the_interf...

He was ahead of the curve even on developments that were brand new in 2008 like social media:

“I'm interested in anti-social networking. I'm interested in protecting private data and one's own history in this environment of unprecedented disclosure.” (Part 4 of the interview)

I was in highschool (IGCSE) in 1994 and for the final computer studies project whereas everyone else made excel calculators and "Hello world" equivalents, I nerded out and built a full fledged inventory management system for the local Toyota dealership. My dad found someone in his office who knew Dbase-4 and autocad and spent many weekends with him learning the basics and developing my project. It turned out better than expected and the invigilator from the GCSE board told my school that I had plagiarised the code, that there was no way a 15yo would put that much effort into it. Well, I had to write & rewrite the code several times because of storage/hard drive issues back then and recited some of the code back to the invigilator orally! My CS teacher was in complete shock, poor chap! I'll never forget the poorly drawn autocad designs for some of the computer parts in my inventory system. Thank you John Walker.

Xanadu, folks. It's quite a tragedy that Wired Magazine's article failed to uncover the real reason Xanadu failed to become the WWW (hence why Smalltalk didn't become the scripting language rather than Javascript, etc.).

https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/

What's the real reason Xanadu failed to become the WWW?

I read a couple of Xanadu papers recently and my conclusion is that it failed to get big because it was mostly vaporware and when it finally delivered something it was much less than the press. The papers are interesting to read, but brilliant non-beings will always lose to more pedestrian beings. The story reminded me quite a bit of Chandler in "Dreaming in Code" by Scott Rosenberg.

Don't get me wrong, if you read Ted Nelson writing about Xanadu uncritically, you'll get a tale of utopia denied and genius tortured, but the reality seems much more prosaic.

Edit: I should also add that the web as originally built has real advantages over Xanadu. In order to implement its universal transclusion and DRM (yes, Xanadu had a scheme for DRM and micropayments to creators), Xanadu had to be centralized. I'd argue this is worse both socially and technologically. Adding DRM to the infrastructure of the web is something that I would really hate.

One man's vaporware is another man's roadmap. Think about it like this:

Why was Brendan Eich under such pressure from VCs to throw together a scripting language over a weekend?

Not "from VCs". Marc was not a VC then, Netscape's investors didn't direct any of our strategic or tactical moves. Bill Joy at Sun also supported JS as scripting language for Java, and signed the trademark license. Excerpt on the early days and why we did JS (part of 3 hour Lex Fridman interview):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0ZWtsYyX8E

HOPL paper: https://hopl4.sigplan.org/details/hopl-4-papers/10/JavaScrip...

I stand corrected (and also note the "weekend" was really 10 days). Jim Clark* apparently gave Marc Andreessen the necessary latitude.

* The other person with an office opening into Keith's work area at Memex was Ron Resch https://www.historyofcg.com/pages/university-of-utah/

"In order to implement its universal transclusion and DRM (yes, Xanadu had a scheme for DRM and micropayments to creators), Xanadu had to be centralized."

Fallback positions from the idealized "roadmap" are what happens when VCs get involved with a system that offers that Zero To One advantage -- but you have to have a One to offer the VCs, which Memex didn't. The question then becomes how much of your road map can be recovered or, perhaps more to the point, do you even _want_ to recover in the light of ground truth experience? At present there is a lot of potential for Information Centric Networking that would be more likely realized in a Ship-Dumbed-Down-Decentralized-Xanadu1994 alternative universe than is likely to be realized now.

I was there (you'll find my name in the Wired article), and on the whole I would agree that Xanadu's reach far exceeded its grasp. Compared to the simplicity of the http protocol, Xanadu's complexity was high enough and its performance low enough that there was little opportunity for a genuine competition.

But I will say that Xanadu was conceptually not centralized; the peer-to-peer exchange of arbitrary information at scale was definitely part of the architecture. However, the major and systemic performance problems entirely prevented any scaling up of the system, which effectively means the distributed architecture was never proven.

I agree to a certain extent with the Chandler analogy, insofar as there was a lot of "architecture astronautics" that added complexity to the system beyond the ability of the team to manage -- especially given the limitations of early 1990s development machines.

One could refer to the article itself for Walker's own view of the sad outcome:

'Rather than push their product into the marketplace quickly, where it could compete, adapt, or die, the Xanadu programmers intended to produce their revolution ab initio.

'“When this process fails,” wrote Walker in his collection of documents from and about Autodesk, “and it always does, that doesn’t seem to weaken the belief in a design process which, in reality, is as bogus as astrology. It’s always a bad manager, problems with tools, etc.—precisely the unpredictable factors which make a priori design impossible in the first place.”'

He wasn't wrong. Xanadu tried to leap fully formed into the world as a megalithic architecture capable of arbitrarily large data structures supporting arbitrarily small comparisons and transclusions, and it couldn't compete with HTTP's fully open specification and implementations, low barrier to entry, and extreme simplicity.

I appreciate the boots-on-the-ground perspective, so thanks for posting! I do want to be clear that I do appreciate the research and enjoy reading the papers produced by Xanadu. My goal was never to belittle the project itself, just talk about reasons for history playing out as it did.

No worries, I didn't interpret your comment as belittlement. I agree the project was over-ambitious and overly complex, but it was also visionary and influential.

1994: In the next room from me at Memex Corp. poor Keith Henson was draped over a chair (due to a bad back) working, alone, on the C++ Xanadu code to debug garbage collection among other things, because the original Smalltalk source had been lost. Memex Corp. was early enough in HTTP's development of lock-in network effects, that its acquisition of Xanadu _might_ yet have turned the tide. Why had the Smalltalk code been lost? Well, all I can tell you as that from my work with Roger (starting in 1996 on a rocket engine) that my understanding of events differs from that reported in Wired (and most others including, to some extent, Roger himself) and involves some pretty, shall we say, "bad behavior" on the part of certain parties that were more than a little partial to C++. Since this is hearsay, I won't go into more depth stating things "as fact". But it is pretty clear to me that the effort and investment put into making HTML, JS, etc. de facto standards, combined with Memex's acquisition of Xanadu rights (and potential willingness to open up the Xanadu protocols and implementation) at that critical juncture was fatally hampered by the C++-only handicap suffered by the Xanadu source.

Why didn't I step in and help poor Keith? Ever heard of Croquet's TeaTime?

https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/1094855.1094861

I was in a position to resurrect at least _that_ much of the original work I'd one at Viewtron Corp. of America based on David P. Reed's PhD thesis, and Reed was just down the street from us at Interval Research at that time, which rather tempted me away from helping Keith, even if I'd been authorized to do so, which I wasn't.

I first met John around 1972, when I was working with the Sperry UNIVAC 1108 mainframe system at NYU and he was with Axicom Systems in NJ. Many UNIVAC sites shared their local OS modifications and utilities, and I was blown away by the beauty, scope, and sheer quantity of John's code. He wrote everything from multi-thread tape and disk I/O utilities to an OS whose sole purpose was to turn the 1108 mainframe into a Morse code audio oscillator; you'd type on the operator's console keyboard, and the code would toggle the machine between user and system modes at just the right rate to produce beeps from the console's speaker. Nobody else even knew it had a speaker.

When I left NYU for Information Systems Design (another UNIVAC 1100 series site, in Santa Clara, CA) in 1975, one of the factors that drew me was that John now worked there (as well as at Bechtel Systems in SF). When he then founded Marinchip Systems, I was one of several ISD programmers who moonlighted by writing utilities for that TI 9900-based system, for which John designed the circuit boards and wrote the operating system. An early attempt at what eventually became AutoCAD (Interact, by Mike Riddle) was one of the software packages available for the Marinchip 9900. By the time the IBM PC was introduced in 1981, however, John realized that he should quit the hardware business and concentrate on software. Gathering a bunch of us from ISD, along with several Marinchip users and dealers, at his home in Mill Valley, CA, John planted the seeds of Autodesk.

All that said, it should be noted that I unintentionally sent him one too many political emails about 25 years ago, and he cut me off completely. I know I'm not the only one to suffer a similar outcome. Nonetheless, I am proud to have worked alongside John; I am positive that AutoCAD, Autodesk, and I would not be where we are today were it not for his vision, creativity, and drive. RIP.

Hi Duff

>> I unintentionally sent him one too many political emails about 25 years ago, and he cut me off completely

Wow, that must have hurt!

John was certainly curious. And became curiouser and curiouser. And, nevertheless, always an open source inspiration.

Theo

I think I used autodesk software more than anything else except Windows, and it never dawned on me it was founded by a person with a vision. John Carmack and a lot of ID staff were known among gamers of the era, but I don't think I know any CAD person who knows John Walker, or graphic person who knows Knoll bros behind Photoshop. Made me look up Simonyi who designed Excel. Obscure people behind software that keeps the world turning.

Since I came across it in its very early days, for nearly three decades the fourmilab.ch site has been the one constant in my weblife. Treasure trove of projects and ideas and book suggestions. Eclectic is the word which pops up in my head right now and insists on being used.

Had a few email exchanges with the man himself. On randomness, on English grammar, on Swedish adventures in The Thirty Years' War, on certain politics (where we didn't necessarily see eye to eye but where there was plenty of room for civilised discussion). Unfailingly polite, informative, entertaining, and of course with cognitive ressources most of us can only dream of.

John Walker, thanks for all the effort and the inspiration. I shall miss your presence.

I recall the small dot-c text file that was passed around, that contained his sequence of tests for float integrity on a portable C compiler and architecture. It was a gold-standard at the time.

It was also ported to a number of languages and used as a benchmark.

https://www.fourmilab.ch/fbench/ffbench.html

Wow! It went down from over 2000 seconds to less than half a second, as HW improved. And the last test was ran on a Pentium 4. I wonder what are the results on today's HW.

No need to wonder. You can run it. https://www.fourmilab.ch/fbench/

OK, tested the C version on my Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-1065G7 CPU @ 1.30GHz and following the instructions

> Measured run time in seconds should be divided by 400000 to normalise for reporting results. For archival results, adjust iteration count so the benchmark runs about five minutes.

so it ran for 246 seconds (almost 5 minutes) and the normalized result is:

0.000617025

He parted ways with Autodesk a long time ago but it would have been nice for his former company to acknowledge him https://www.autodesk.com/

Right. I was looking for a press release or something. Did not see one.

Yeah, that's cold.

When steve jobs died people were leaving post its and mementos at my local apple stote… which were promptly removed. Corporations are completely sociopathic

They still have nothing (as of now) https://www.autodesk.com/search?qt=john%20walker&sn=en_US&us...

Came here to write the same thing. Bizarre that there is literally nothing about his death on their website or social media accounts.

I first heard of his passing in an email from an guy I knew from the olden days at Autodesk. He was passing on an inquiry from Carl Bass (CEO in the first years of the century). Took a couple of days to find a solid answer, which came from a Swiss site that John had posted to in recent years. BTW, neither the SF Chronicle nor the local Marin paper, San Rafael Independent-Journal, has run an item on this; nor did either evince any interest when I sent them the news. It hardly needs mentioning that Autodesk is very well known in Marin County. The lack of public notice on the Autodesk site is rather odd; the company management in this century has had nothing like the contempt for the founders that prevailed in the Bartz regime.

Autodesk used to take off the week of Christmas to New Years, called it the 'week of rest' - however most of us in tech new that was far from what John would do.

When we returned from that week of analog living, John always had some new and exciting code to share (because he never stopped). Hypertext, Autoshade and Autoflix, AutoCAD Mac were some of the gifts he would showcase after the break.

It was pretty magical. It was very common for John to be at the center of anything new and exciting happening there.

He changed my life, without question.

Hi Jamie

He changed my life as well. For me, the deepest game changer was AutoLisp.

Nowadays, I'm on JavaScript and Three.js, but it's much the same: code, hit enter and bingo an updated graphic appears on the screen.

Thank you, John,

Theo

His Hacker’s Diet really helped me out 15 years ago or so. Cheers John

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker%27s_Diet

Likewise, but more like 20 years ago for me. Kept it off for many years as well.

I should do that again actually. Gained some weight during COVID.

Me too, though it was more like 25 years. If someone asked me "who is your hero", I would answer John Walker. To be honest, I didn't know all that much about him beyond The Hacker's Diet, his own autobiography/Autodesk File, and the stuff on his web site circa 15-20 years ago. But the things I did know seemed admirable:

* He was an engineer's engineer, and when his company became successful, the impression I got was that he stayed one.

* The Hacker's Diet is a good example - approaching weight loss as a problem to be solved the same as any other: by learning what's known about it and using empiricism and data.

* As far as I can tell, at some point he decided he had achieved all the money he needed so he went off to Switzerland and became a sort of mad scientist, pursuing whatever interested him for the rest of his life. Including things like the hotbits random number generator, where he installed a radiation source in his basement and used it to serve random bits up via a public web API.

None of us are perfect, and it's best not to know too much about one's heroes, so I didn't. I looked up to the John Walker in my mind as the person I want to be when I grow up, and this sad news hits hard.

It's basic CICO, from having skimmed it. The problem is this type of diet has the greatest likelihood of failing. CICO is hard to maintain. Eventually willpower fails and gradual overeating begins, leading to surprisingly large and abrupt weight regain. Being persistently hungry all the time just sucks.

Some of the stuff is possibly wrong, like this

There's a lot of nonsense floating around regarding exercise and weight control. The only way to lose weight is to eat less than your body burns. Period. Exercising causes your body to burn more, but few people have the time or inclination to exercise enough to make a big difference. An hour of jogging is worth about one Cheese Whopper. Now, are you going to really spend an hour on the road every day just to burn off that extra burger?

There is scant to zero literature to suggest exercising raises metabolism. Recent research by Herman Pontzer shows the opposite, that calories burned with exercise are negated later through lowered BMR and NEAT. So if you do a 400-calorie run and then eat a 400 calorie cookie, you will still get a net 400 gain, or close to it.

Didn't want to delve into it in the original comment but what you mention is correct and is one of the reasons I mentioned how far back this was.

I haven't read Herman Pontzer's recent research, I'd equate to becoming a more efficient runner; as efficiency increases energy demands are reduced.

Some of today's research just didn't exist when this was written. Of course, some of the advice was already debatable by the time I got to read it in the mid-late 00's, but that can be said for a lot of health and fitness advice even today.

I didn't follow it proscriptively. What it did do was give me a different approach to tackling it as a problem and was the first resource I had read that helped in that regard. Everything else was very much eat less of this and more of that

Like thread's asking which book/resource to use when learning to code, there are many good examples out there. Not all are perfect, and some are occasionally wrong but like that example, this was the one that stuck with me.

Something most people miss, as it is only briefly mentioned, is he was eating on big meal each day after work. That's basically like 20/2 intermittent fasting. It definitely would have had an effect on his metabolism and insulin resistance. It's not a dictum, he just gives an anecdote and mentions it.

I was reviewing HD a few years ago to see if it still held up against current, prevailing wisdom and noticed this. Kind of blew my mind.

You could achieve a constant NEAT by having a daily step goal or some prescribed amount of activities outside your exercise routine. I am supposed to do 2 hours of exercise per day plus give or take 10K steps. This can easily make me extremely active by American standard.

Now, surely your BMR will compensate, but probably only to a certain point.

In the end, it's probably easier to just eat healthy and eat less rather than trying to increase your caloric expenditure, but that's also rather hard to do for a variety of reasons.

Also, regular exercise will have more benefits than just increasing your caloric expenditure. It keeps your muscle mass from deterioriating as you age.

“Supposed to”? Is this a lifestyle/athletic goal, or a medical recommendation (or something else)?

There’s a time and a place, man. Well actuallying on an obituary isn’t it.

> CICO is hard to maintain. Eventually willpower fails and gradual overeating begins, leading to surprisingly large and abrupt weight regain.

The key difference, for nerd hackers, is the floater/sinker graph and the average. Some apps do this these days, though it seems to be less common than it was a few years ago (e.g. Withings and Apple no longer present their data that way).

So as long as the sinker is below the trend you will lose, at some rate. You don’t have to be starving yourself unless you have a fetish, just stay below the trend line. When you have a spurt of enthusiasm you can drive yourself lower; when you are finding it hard, just try to stay below trend.

It’s a manual form of gamification.

> So if you do a 400-calorie run

That's not enough, the energy will be provided by glycogen stored in muscles and fat stored in the liver and those will be restored quickly. What happens if you do a 3000 calorie bike tour is the interesting question.

Exercising raises metabolism at least during during the exercise (anything different would be a physical nonsense) - the issue is not exercising enough.

>It's basic CICO, from having skimmed it. The problem is this type of diet has the greatest likelihood of failing.

I couldn't disagree more. THD is not really a diet, it just explains the baseline facts of weight loss and enables you to choose whatever diet that works for you. It takes the mystery out of it. You may gain weight one week and lose weight the next, but you will know why.

The hackers diet makes a very convincing argument that any diet that works is in fact "CICO in disguise". The key point being that "Calories in" is not whatever is printed on the box, it is instead /what your body has absorbed from it/.

So for example when you eat 3000 calories of salmon in bearnaise sauce as part of your Atkins or whatever and you lose weight, clearly your body is not absorbing 3000 calories (for whatever reason). If you follow the hacks in THD you will discover this, and any other effect various foods have on /you/. It will also help you discover if a 400-calorie run actually works for you or not.

I am very thankful to Mr Walker for writing THD. He gave me the tools to "fix myself" when I notice that I have put on a few, and I have used those tools successfully many times.

> The problem is this type of diet has the greatest likelihood of failing. CICO is hard to maintain.

CICO is hard for people who are fat or who will become fat. It is not true it is hard. It is poor impulse control, not lack of willpower.

> There is scant to zero literature to suggest exercising raises metabolism. Recent research by Herman Pontzer shows the opposite, that calories burned with exercise are negated later through lowered BMR and NEAT. So if you do a 400-calorie run and then eat a 400 calorie cookie, you will still get a net 400 gain, or close to it.

Nonsense, this is a lie to make obese people not exercise. Anyone who has exercised knows this is fake news. By perpetrating fake "science" you are also a source of demotivating people to improve. It is disgusting to post this. Look at a runner, your fake "science" busted. The Hadza are as genetically removed from other humans as possible (including their distance from other African peoples).

>>Some of the stuff is possibly wrong, like this

>There's a lot of nonsense floating around regarding exercise and weight control. The only way to lose weight is to eat less than your body burns. Period. Exercising causes your body to burn more, but few people have the time or inclination to exercise enough to make a big difference. An hour of jogging is worth about one Cheese Whopper. Now, are you going to really spend an hour on the road every day just to burn off that extra burger?

He is wrong and very wrong at that, while stating something that is factually correct. This is like telling a man that he is poor because he earns too little and spends too much - "see it's simple arithmetic" is the stand take by someone who does not know all the variable.

Most geeky types personalities are like that - they completely fail to realize or appreciate the enormous complexities of biological systems and think that they can model a biological system in their spreadsheets or formulas.

For anyone wanting to read this book

https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/e4/introduction.html

Anyone else feel a little weird reading the section about exercise?

> You exercise because you'll live longer and you'll feel better.

It's a little depressing that despite a good diet and exercise, he had a slightly shorter than average lifespan. When I put in the effort to eat well and exercise, I know I certainly have the mindset that it will extend my life. I hope that at the least he felt strong and healthy.

He died from an accident. Stairs can be hazardous.

Source?

Private forum post at Scanalyst. I accidentally posted a ref on HN to it earlier not noticing it was not public.

Thanks.

no cause of death is given. people who are healthy can still die early from accidents

How functional you are in later years certainly correlates to exercise and diet.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker's_Diet

it even has a wiki devoted to it? Seems a tad overdone but I guess it meets the criteria of notability.

Same here. Thank you John!

I was put on it by nuwen.net, went from 110 to 80 some 15 years ago, changed my life. RIP

"We'll Return, After This Message" is one of my all-time favorite short stories: https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/sftriple/gpic.html

sigh

I met him briefly at one of the West Coast Computer Faires, in the early days of AutoDesk, or maybe pre-AutoDesk.

His name was familiar to me from the infamous "Pervading Animal Game" on the Univac mainframes. "Introducing a new way of distributing software, Pervasive Release. If someone asks you for your program, you can tell them that in all likelihood, they already have it." There were a number of other, more serious programs in the Univac 1108 ecosystem that had his name on them.

It would be unfair to call this a virus, as it went to great lengths to insure that it couldn't do any harm, other than the few kilobytes it took up in a "program file". (Think "directory" in modern terms.)

HotBits is my earliest memory from the Internet after getting access as a young kid around 1996. Back in those days computer magazines would print website reviews and links, and I found HotBits in one of those. It was fascinating to a young kid who was into computers and physics.

Over a decade later I read the Autodesk File and it was a major inspiration for founding my first startup.

He was an inspiration to generations of hackers.

One of my first “computer” jobs in college was working as an AutoCAD draftsman for a tiny architecture firm. My specialty? Designing parking lots for various Discount Tire stores haha.

Rest in peace

Edit: you can work AutoCAD crazy fast once you get all the keyboard shortcuts figured out

I was particularly fond of his ATLAST Forth-like programming language.

https://www.fourmilab.ch/atlast/

Rest in peace.

I loved that language. I actually forked it, used it for a lot of stuff, bloated it (started by just trying to port to x86-64, ended up with a mini-FORTH with regexes, FFI to C, etc.). I still use it every day, though mostly for doing math in hex.

Another atlast fan here. I used it as an extension language for SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) and wrote games for the GP2X handheld in a Forth-like language. Everything should be scriptable.

His writings in "The AutoDesk File" are incredible and had a huge impact on the rise of the PC and the PC era overall. I shared some thoughts here https://x.com/stevesi/status/1755737707857555775.

I hope those who take care of John's affairs will find a way to preserve fourmilab.ch (although the Wayback Machine is already doing the job, too) – although the site's still up, I worry that some direct debit will fail...

It's being taken care of.

I recently joined scanalyst and binge trawled the site to read everything accessible.

It is oasis in the midst of all the internet cacophony and I'm glad to 'it's being taken of'

RIP John.

I met John in early 1983 at Autodesk. My company, Digital Control Systems, Inc. was one of the first AutoCad “Dealers”. Great memories of the first few years of Autodesk when John was CEO.

He complemented me on my DOS TSR, Concurrent Plot, II which was an interrupt driven serial/parallel background plot spooling program.

I remember John telling me, the reason for AutoCad’s early success was IBM’s decision to include the 8087 socket on the original IBM PC motherboard.

Oh I could go on and on but those are all some great memories and I’ll always cherish the time that I got to spend with him.

Godspeed John.

Usually when there's an obituary on HN, I go straight to the comments to read all of the tech-is-a-village "I took his intro to computing course at MIT" or "I worked with her at Atari when we were 15 people in a basement apartment" anecdotes. It's interesting to see that John Walker's legacy here is instead defined by his work, his writing, and his correspondence.

(Not to diminish the value of those contributions, of course - that's an artifact of the life he presumably wanted to lead. And his legacy is perhaps the more durable for it.)

Darn.

I never had direct contact with John Walker. Outside of family and friends, the Autodesk founders probably had the biggest impact on my life.

In 11th grade, I submitted a grant application on behalf of my school. I wanted to draw molecules. My teacher (for our voc tech program) gave me the blank paperwork and said "go for it".

Some time later, two NEC APC III showed up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APC_series#APC_III Running AutoCAD. On 8" floppy media. The manuals were in 3-ring binders. Hot damn, I loved those computers. So much better than the more common IBM PC-XT. I'd take portions of the manuals home over night to study.

One of the upgrades featured AutoLISP. Version 2.17b? That really lit my fire. Like LOGO turtle on steroids or something.

I eventually published some shareware using AutoCAD/AutoLISP. Pretty good money for a kid.

AutoCAD, AutoShade, AutoSOLID, AutoFlix (Animator), HP plotters (using drafting pens and inks), transition from sneaker-net to LANs... Truly mind blowing stuff. Democratizing all that high-end workstation stuff (eg Apollo) for us normies.

Autodesk begat an entire ecosystem from scratch. Dealer channels, third party add-ons and utilities, conferences, magazines, curriculum, consultants, custom graphics cards (and drivers), huge CRTs, crazy variety of input hardware (pen tablets and chorded keyboards), etc, etc.

Helluva an achievement.

Thanks John Walker. RIP.

> Autodesk begat an entire ecosystem from scratch. Dealer channels, third party add-ons and utilities, conferences, magazines, curriculum, consultants, custom graphics cards (and drivers), huge CRTS, crazy variety of input hardware (pen tablets and chorded keyboards), etc, etc.

Yes. When AutoCAD came out, personal computers were expensive, exotic, fragile devices. Especially when they needed a big graphics-capable CRT, a mouse, a pen input tablet, and a large pen plotter. Dealers had to be set up to sell and service all that gear. An architect whose update device had previously been a powered eraser and a blueprint machine needed some handholding to computerize with confidence. Customers needed someone local they could call when it broke. Much of early Autodesk involved setting up that infrastructure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Walker_(programmer)

We need to put some work into this...

I remember getting an email from John in the early days of Autodesk.

At the time most developers had Sun workstations and he had gotten into all our systems and ran a password crack program looking for weak passwords. Our network wasn't attached to the outside world yet so most of us had weak passwords.

Mine password was a geologic time era something like "Devonian". His only comment was, "No, Jurassic!". The name of his machine? Jurassic Sparc.

I fell in love with 3D Studio in the 90's. It was so intuitive to use compared to Lightwave3D for someone who didn't know what they were doing, but very curious and wanting to learn. A big challenge was getting it to run in windows 3.1 when that was released, but it did. Ah, and having to create a RAM drive to put the video into so you could actually watch it in real time without buffering at 320x200 (i386 days).

But that had nothing todo with John. He already left before Autodesk bought 3D Studio.

FWIW: John left in 1994 (same year I did) and technically Autodesk had acquired 3D Studio in 1990, though the Yost group was still developing it, so acquired is a generous term. The product was sold through Autodesk's dealer channels. The branding and marketing was all Autodesk.

John had little to nothing to do with 3D studio however, there was a mild competition within the company with two different 3D rendering (Autoshade and 3D Studio) products. I worked on both, moving from AutoFlix development to helping the Yost group test and market 3D Studio.

Hoping this doesn't offend against the site's guidelines (it doesn't seem to) - Hey, Jamie, nice to hear from you here.

Hi Dan (and Jamie again)

Because of John - and learning to code using AutoLisp - they will pull the keyboard out of my cold dead hand.

Theo

Very sad news. In the mid 90s I used his ATLAST in a commercial product and reached out to him for some help. He was very gracious. R.I.P John Walker

Fascinating article on his website (there are many!) about a WSJ reporter playing a fool during an interview with him:

https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/e5/?chapter=chapter2_99

Fake news always gonna fake, eh?

> Multimedia being, as of this writing, insufficiently advanced to permit me to embed two hours of video in this book.

1992!

RIP John Walker. His fourmilab site is a surviving relic of the old web. Full of interesting stuff.

Used to run his very code to do in-browser js encryption.. RIP

My all-time favorite website is his "Bending Spacetime in the Basement"[1].

RIP John Walker.

[1] https://www.fourmilab.ch/gravitation/foobar/

This was amazing. Thanks for that.

This, along with the rest of his website, was written up in a review in the front matter of Science magazine, several years ago. They do not do such reviews often, if ever.

One of my earlier professional programming projects was to build a set of custom tools for engineering in Autolisp. Rip Mr. Walker

Same here. Although "professional" might've been a stretch for me back then. I had no idea what lisp or functional programming was.

Yes, perhaps similarly, my endeavor was to build tools for engineering drawings. Definitely was a surface level usage of autolisp.

RIP, Autodesk (the company) was such a big name in my early years

I never saw early autocad, here's demo https://yewtu.be/watch?v=Apb5ayyCHaE

It still is. Any serious CAD user knows that there’s nothing that comes quite close to AutoCAD after all these years (even with all the pork introduced by new developers).

AutoCAD is a transformative product and one that really helped me appreciate good software design (albeit only seeing it through AutoCAD’s commandline and AutoLISP). Autodesk has lost a legend and his legacy will live on.

> AutoCAD is a transformative product

It really was. It replaced manual drafting. Drawing revision before AutoCAD involved maintaining a master drawing and updating it manually with pencils and erasers. Final drawings were inked in. Copies were made by running master drawings through a blueprint machine. When there were too many revisions, someone had to redraw the drawing by hand, and the copy had to be checked by hand by a checker.

There were CAD systems before AutoCAD, but they either required a more expensive computer than an PC, or they couldn't handle a drawing too big for memory. The big innovation in AutoCAD is that it had a paging system for working on drawings too big for the machine. The code was paged in and out in segments. The drawing was paged in and out in sections.

(I did some of the early AutoCAD ports to non-IBM PCs. Compatibility hadn't been established yet. Everything needed a driver. AutoCAD had "more drivers than Yellow Cab" at one point.)

On balance, CAD has improved the industry for sure. But, because I'm old enough to yell at clouds, I would like to point out the flip side.

In manual drafting days, changes were hard, as you note. But because of that, there was a LOT more pre-planning, because once you start putting the Koh-I-Noor to mylar, changes were difficult. So you avoided them whenever possible. Architects had to sit down with owners and say, "look, past this point, you don't get to make changes, at least not for free."

Now, buildings are quite often designed-by-addenda. The due date is just a date. You get extra time to actually "finish" the job by issuing massive addendums prior to bid. And because of that, architects don't make owners sit down and tell them everything, so you'll get A/V or finishes or whatever really, really late in the design phase. "No problem, we'll fix it by addendum."

I am also a bit sad that drafting skills have died out somewhat. I've seen some really, really beautiful bluelines. I've heard of electrical engineers who would make smiley-faces with their homerun arrows. And the process of manual lettering is very zen, and teaches people spatial awareness like nothing else.

All that said, man alive, I love AutoCAD. Embedding Lisp in the program was amazing. The modern thing is now Revit, which has some good things going for it as well, but it is not (and may never be) anywhere near ACAD for a lot of work. RIP John.

AutoLISP was put in because it was a memory-safe interpreter. Allowing users to extend AutoCAD with C would have created a debugging nightmare. AutoLISP could detect its own errors without crashing AutoCAD. LISP was the only game in town back then for interpreters which could deal with variable-sized data.

AutoCAD users were not programmers. Computer knowledge was not widespread. Keeping users from losing their drawing files, a major long-term asset, was crucial to product acceptance. There was a strong "don't screw up" ethos within Autodesk. Much of that came from the founders, who were mostly mainframe operating system programmers.

Interesting. As I recall, we never thought of the paging as a big innovation: just what had to be done in order to do anything in a memory space of 128K bytes. You can bet that it presented an interesting challenge in adding the UNDO feature to the existing system. BTW it seems to me that AutoCAD never got much recognition for its technical innovations. One very early example: It was almost certainly the very first program which could run equally well with or without the 8087 floating-point chip (ahem - except for speed!), needing no special user configuration or anything. Credit where credit is due: Not a Walker idea, but an inspiration of one of the unsung super-hackers among the original crew.

I first discovered John Walker through The Hacker's Diet and other writings, and corresponded with him back when I was doing an offshore datahaven 25 years ago. He was an amazing person -- curious, intelligent, and willing to share what he'd learned with the world. He supported many worthwhile projects behind the scenes as well. Sad I never got to meet him in person.

Wild to discover he’s been living in my area while I’ve been using autocad and inventor all this time. There’s even a picture of the brass band my neighbour is playing in… Life is strange.

https://www.fourmilab.ch/images/album/2014-03-14/concert_b_2...

I was looking for a comment like this to verify it was him. I met him in the early 2000's when we were travelling to Les Trophées du Libre (a free software contest and awards event). I think we were both judges. We sat next to each other on the bus and he was explaining how he had moved to Switzerland and renounced his US citizenship and how I should do so too since I moved to Sweden. I remember being confused because he seemed way to humble and down to Earth to be the founder of Autodesk.

From the pictures it seems he was living in Lignères, a small village in the Jura "mountains". For sure you have to be humble to live here when you could afford to live in Gstaad. It says all about the man and his priorities in life.

I've been a happy reader of fourmilab.ch for years. His book reviews, the hacker's diet, and his other tools are one of the treasures of the internet. Not to mention his creation of AutoCad (a tool I loved in high school and college, after his time but I'm grateful none the less). RIP, John.

Ok, he had a profound impact on me also. More importantly, I would like to know the cause of death because I can't believe he died so young. He was nearly obsessed with health, the hacker's diet, exercises, and lately paleo diet.

What the hell happened??? Anybody??

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39225011

The bare essentials:

> John had a bad fall down some stairs at his house.

> He suffered extensive intracranial bleeding, was found unconscious, and the situation is inoperable.

I first came to know about Autodesk, when I got to try AutoCAD on DOS in mid 90s. It was snappy and fast even on the hardware of that era. Pentium had just come out. Later on, did some modeling and animation on 3d Studio on DOS.

This was well before Autodesk started buying up all the competition.

I started on version 10 on DOS around 1991 or 1992. I think version 12 was the last one on DOS, and it was so snappy! Never been the same since.

I cold called him one day and despite my having been a rando he took the time to help me out.

His relaxed view on learning foreign languages (along the lines of "as long as you avoid having tonnes of manure dumped in your front yard, you're doing OK") was also very helpful!

I am in tears, hearing these kind words.. I finally have a hero that I can look upto.

John experimented with the Paleo Diet in the 2010's and did a book review of the "Paleo Diet" book by Loren Cordain. I emailed him and suggested he read a related book, "The New Evolution Diet" by Art De Vany. He immediately wrote back a friendly email and ended up reviewing that book as well. He mentioned in his email that he was only interested in the nutritional aspects of the Paleo Diet, as he had his weight control covered by his own system, the Hacker's Diet.

I was gently pushed towards the parenthetical path by a friends mother who worked as a autolisp programmer. So I have always had a fondness for the realm of Autodesk and thus John Walker.

RIP John Walker I met him only once in Neuchâtel Autodesk Office back in 2006 or so, since then I wanted to visit him as he lived only a few miles from my swiss village, but tool late... RIP John we never knew each other well but you definitly had a positif impact on my life... From early evening AutoLISP programming with friends, beers and pizza to my Autodesk years... Keep the spirtit alive ! Nicolas Menu

And this time, I have a public link to the announcement.

This is a reference to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39225011, which is still relevant, and sad.

Thanks for posting these.

I was a bit embarrassed the first time.

I was hoping the second post would be "expected to make a full recovery", but unfortunately no.

I really love and was deeply inspired by the great work that John Walker did with Rudy Rucker on cellular automata, starting with Autodesk's product CelLab, then James Gleick's CHAOS -- The Software, Rudy's Artificial Life Lab, John's Home Planet, then later the JavaScript version WebCA, and lots of extensive documentation and historical information on his web page.

CelLab:

https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/

https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/classic/

https://www.fourmilab.ch/homeplanet/

https://www.rudyrucker.com/oldhomepage/cellab.htm

>CelLab History

>(A more detailed history of cellular automata appears in the CelLab User Guide.) The first edition of CelLab was developed by Rudy Rucker and John Walker in 1988 and 1989 when both were working in the Autodesk research lab. The package was to be the first title in the "Autodesk Science Series", which would use computer simulation to explore aspects of science and mathematics. The product was first shipped in June of 1989 at a suggested retail price of US$59.95, under the name Rudy Rucker's Cellular Automata Laboratory. Rudy went on to complete the second title in the Science Series, James Gleick's CHAOS -- The Software which used programs developed by Rudy and another Autodesk programmer, Josh Gordon, to illustrate aspects of James Gleick's bestselling book. CHAOS -- The Software shipped in November of 1989. Rudy was working on the third title in the series, Artificial Life Lab, and John was developing the fourth, Home Planet, when Autodesk's management decided to close the research lab and terminate development of the Science Series. Rudy finished Artificial Life Lab, which was published as a book plus disk by The Waite Group Press in 1993. John released Home Planet as a freeware program in the same year, and the current version can be downloaded from this site.

>The demise of the Science Series orphaned Cellular Automata Laboratory, which disappeared from the market in 1994. Rudy and John explored the idea of a new edition with several publishers, but none seemed to be interested. With the advent of the World-Wide Web, software can be distributed at a minuscule fraction of the cost of packaged software in the 1980's, so this seemed a natural way to get Cellular Automata Laboratory back into the hands of creative people interested in exploring massively parallel computing. Re-launching a program developed almost a decade ago required a modicum of work; a new cellular automata simulator that runs under Windows was developed, the User Guide, originally a 265 page book typeset using LaTeX, was transformed into an HTML document for the Web, and Java was added to the languages one can use to define cellular automata rules, being ever so much more with-it than Pascal, BASIC, and C.

>So now it's finished, or at least at large again. Ideally, CelLab will never be done, not as long as folks continue to use it to explore the world of cellular automata and share their discoveries with other pioneers on this frontier of computing.

Documentation:

https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/manual/

It includes a huge illustrated index and description of many different cellular automata rules:

https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/manual/rules.html

The story about the origins of CelLab is fascinating, telling about how Rudy Rucker learned FORTH just so he could program CA rules for Toffoli's and Margolus's CAM-6 hardware:

https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/manual/chap5.html

Original Windows product, released i 1989, Autodesk Cellab 1.0 - installed files:

https://vetusware.com/download/Autodesk%20CELLAB%201.0/?id=4...

Cellab, Exploring Cellular Automata from DOS era in DOSBox:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=RnZWJV1_wKI

Cellular Automata by Rudy Rucker:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyZUzakG3bE

Programming the CAM-6 Cellular Automata Machine Hardware in Forth (CAM6 Simulator demo):

https://www.reddit.com/r/Forth/comments/zm0ggl/programming_t...

I'm amazed that my beloved CHAOS still runs beautifully on emulators like DOSbox. It was the last programming project where I could completely roll my own interface - and maybe my last really fun one.

Hey Josh! I remember hanging out with you and Laura a long time ago in the Haight! Your beloved CHAOS always got an undeserved bad rap because it was mistakenly confused with KAOS, the international organization of evil bent on world domination, out to get Maxwell Smart and Control! ;)

https://getsmart.fandom.com/wiki/KAOS

http://www.wouldyoubelieve.com/phrases.html

Max: Couldn't you just have shushed him?

Siegfried: Ve Don't Shush Here!!

Shtarker: Let me let them have it. Dudududududu (making a machine gun noise).

Siegfried: Shtarker, zis is KAOS, we don't Dududu here.

http://www.wouldyoubelieve.com/kaos.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3n81Xu-t6o

Heya Don! Kaos != chaos but KAOS == CHAOS. Shh.

Jim Crutchfield is DOCTOR CHAOS -- he's got a PhD in Complexity Science!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4Kn3djJMCE

Space-Time Dynamics in Video Feedback

A film by Jim Crutchfield, Entropy Productions, Santa Cruz (1984). Original U-matic video transferred to digital video. 16 minutes.

James P. Crutchfield. Center for Nonlinear Studies, Los Alamos National Laboratories, Los Alamos, NM 87545, USA.

ABSTRACT: Video feedback provides a readily available experimental system to study complex spatial and temporal dynamics. This article outlines the use and modeling of video feedback systems. It includes a discussion of video physics and proposed two models for video feedback based on a discrete-time iterated functional equation and on a reaction-diffusion partial differential equation. Color photographs illustrate results from actual video experiments. Digital computer simulations of the models reproduce the basic spatio-temporal dynamics found in the experiments.

1. In the beginning there was feedback ...

James P. Crutchfield. "Space-Time Dynamics in Video Feedback." Physica 10D 1984: 229-245.

[pdf] https://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/papers/Crutchfield.PhysicaD1984...

[Plates 1-4] https://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/papers/Crutchfield.PhysicaD1984...

[Plates 5-7] https://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/papers/Crutchfield.PhysicaD1984...

https://csc.ucdavis.edu/~chaos/

CALab and Chaos were great titles to do the tech support on. CALab in particular was instrumental in reviving my joy of coding. I came to Autodesk after burning out at 19 from the stresses of software development, and I never wanted to code again. But because I needed to support customers with rule generation I also need to code in C again. And coding rules were fun, and maybe a year after I moved over to Multimedia as a jr. programmer.

Hmm, another significant way John Walker influenced me. (gb)

He was my idol. And during my stint at Autodesk I've always cited his Autodesk files. Many didn't like that :)

Who could not like The Autodesk Files? (Asking For A Friend)

Even after advent of modern parametric modelers like SolidWorks and Inventor, AutoCAD is still tremendously useful.

The site fourmilab.ch has been an inspiration for me over the years - the Hacker's diet, retropsychokinesis, countless books, his pictures of a nuclear ice-breaker...

I remember 20 years ago or so sending an email for something and he replied, very kindly. I printed it and posted on the wall of my first office!

RIP "Kelvin".

Ah.

I interacted with him a little for HotBits, and provided my own public random number (entropy pool) source for a while.

when we get the black line indicating mourning, it would be nice to have a link to the respective HN post detailing who's gone. I assume the public half mast referes to Mr. Walker, here...

The “X has died” post usually goes to the top pretty fast, making it rather obvious.

"usually", "pretty fast" includes "but sometimes not", "it takes some time". I've had enough occasions where I saw the black label but had no clue what was going on.

Sometimes the post title isn't obvious that a person has died either. "Remembering Paul Graham", e.g., isn't so obvious (maybe to non-native speakers); and there's various ways to word this, ranging from obvious to not.

If HN makes the effort of styling the site, it would be nice to include a link to the 'canonical' related thread, IMO.

Long before I had heard of Autodesk, I came across John Walker's site in the late 90s because he was the author of Speak Freely, an early Internet voice chat program.

Speak Freely was the best, and saved me literally thousands of dollars when I was a post-doc in Australia and my fiancee was still in Canada. I once used it to help with an interview of wearable computing pioneer Steve Mann and an Australian journalist and had to fix an endianess issue to do it.

Safe travels old friend. Thank you for all you did and who you were.

Walker died walking :(

Great website. Really enjoyed his writings. RIP.

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