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John Walker, founder of Autodesk, has died
- jdougan 3y agoAnd this time, I have a public link to the announcement.
- dang 3y agoThis is a reference to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39225011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39225011, which is still relevant, and sad. Thanks for posting these.
- jdougan 3y agoI was a bit embarrassed the first time. I was hoping the second post would be "expected to make a full recovery", but unfortunately no.
- Qem 3y agoRIP John Walker. His fourmilab site is a surviving relic of the old web. Full of interesting stuff.
- prenoob 3y agoUsed to run his very code to do in-browser js encryption.. RIP
- mistrial9 3y agoI 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.
- jdougan 3y agoIt was also ported to a number of languages and used as a benchmark.
- mistrial9 3y agohttps://www.fourmilab.ch/fbench/ffbench.html https://www.fourmilab.ch/fbench/ffbench.html
- darkwater 3y agoWow! 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.
- fallingknife 3y agoNo need to wonder. You can run it. https://www.fourmilab.ch/fbench/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/fbench/
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- darkwater 3y agoOK, 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
- peblos 3y agoHis Hacker’s Diet really helped me out 15 years ago or so. Cheers John https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker%27s_Diet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker%27s_Diet
- btilly 3y agoLikewise, 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.
- masto 3y agoMe 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.
- paulpauper 3y agoIt'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.
- mwcampbell 3y agoLong 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.
- eelstretching 3y agoSpeak 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.
- jim_lawless 3y agoI was particularly fond of his ATLAST Forth-like programming language. https://www.fourmilab.ch/atlast/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/atlast/ Rest in peace.
- 1337p337 3y agoI 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.
- mxyzptlk 3y agoAnother 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.
- gregw2 3y agoHis story of the beginnings of Autodesk (“The Autodesk File”) is very interesting and contains a number of lessons: https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/
- xtracto 3y agoThis 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.
- dylan604 3y agoIt's like that saying, "nobody goes there any more. it's too crowded"
- dcminter 3y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yogi_Berra#%22Yogi-isms%22 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yogi_Berra#%22Yogi-isms%22
- foofie 3y ago> 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.
- agumonkey 3y agoRIP, 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 https://yewtu.be/watch?v=Apb5ayyCHaE
- 1-6 3y agoIt 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).
- toomuchtodo 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Walker_(programmer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Walker_(programmer)
- eggspurt 3y agoWe need to put some work into this...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- defrost 3y agoTakes 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/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/evilempire/
- tralarpa 3y agoThis is a little bit weird: https://www.fourmilab.ch/evilempire/noEU/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/evilempire/noEU/
- defrost 3y agoPerhaps, 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.
- itsoktocry 3y agoWhat's weird about having strong opinions about the European Union?
- walthamstow 3y agoI 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.
- shepardrtc 3y agoI 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.
- rcb 3y agoVery 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
- HeOwnsTwitter 3y agoOne of my earlier professional programming projects was to build a set of custom tools for engineering in Autolisp. Rip Mr. Walker
- antod 3y agoSame here. Although "professional" might've been a stretch for me back then. I had no idea what lisp or functional programming was.
- HeOwnsTwitter 3y agoYes, perhaps similarly, my endeavor was to build tools for engineering drawings. Definitely was a surface level usage of autolisp.
- havaloc 3y agoI 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.
- ResNet 3y agoI think this is the JS tool mentioned: https://bigarrow.tripod.com/js-encr/j4jscrypt.html https://bigarrow.tripod.com/js-encr/j4jscrypt.html His main website is really fantastic, well worth a visit: https://www.fourmilab.ch/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/
- 1-6 3y agoAutoCAD 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.
- Animats 3y ago> 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.)
- deltarholamda 3y agoOn 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.
- hitekker 3y agoHe 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/ https://www.autodesk.com/
- francisofascii 3y agoRight. I was looking for a press release or something. Did not see one.
- djmips 3y agoYeah, that's cold.
- doubloon 3y agoWhen steve jobs died people were leaving post its and mementos at my local apple stote… which were promptly removed. Corporations are completely sociopathic
- eggspurt 3y agoThey still have nothing (as of now) https://www.autodesk.com/search?qt=john%20walker&sn=en_US&us_op=dotcom https://www.autodesk.com/search?qt=john%20walker&sn=en_US&us...
- 015UUZn8aEvW 3y agoCame here to write the same thing. Bizarre that there is literally nothing about his death on their website or social media accounts.
- dandrake 3y agoI 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.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y agoGreat website. Really enjoyed his writings. RIP.
- interfixus 3y agoSince 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.
- nsoonhui 3y ago[flagged]
- Zetobal 3y agoI dunno what to say mate but what a horrible thing to comment especially when he left in 1994. I knew John from the early demoscene and he was an exceptional engineer, friendly, opinionated but always trying to help.
- pavlov 3y agoWait, was John Walker involved in the demoscene? That’s crazy. I want to hear this story.
- DonHopkins 3y agoCelLab is demonstrably scenic! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39300605 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39300605
- eesmith 3y agoYour complaints about modern Autodesk seem inappropriate in someone's memorial thread given that Walker appears to have nothing to do with the valid points your raised, and likely was against them. Walker resigned from Autodesk in 1994, and stepped down as chair years before then. A quick read of his 2003 "The Digital Imprimatur" at https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/ tells me he didn't like these changes either. For one, around 2000 he thought "the emergence of viable international OpenSource alternatives to commercial software seemed to guarantee that control over computers and Internet was beyond the reach of any government or software vendor—any attempt to mandate restrictions in commercial software would only make OpenSource alternatives more compelling and accelerate their general adoption."
- 082349872349872 3y agoI 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!
- orsenthil 3y agoI have benefited from his "The Hackers Diet" book - https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/ 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.
- cryptozeus 3y agoThanks for sharing this. What a gem !
- tjansen 3y agoWow, 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.
- jimmydddd 3y agoThis 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.
- gtirloni 3y agoLooks nice! Is the science sound?
- Quekid5 3y agoIf 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.
- p_l 3y agoFor 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.
- nxobject 3y agoI 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...
- rurban 3y agoHe was my idol. And during my stint at Autodesk I've always cited his Autodesk files. Many didn't like that :)
- dandrake 3y agoWho could not like The Autodesk Files? (Asking For A Friend)
- forgingahead 3y agoFascinating 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 https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/e5/?chapter=chapter2_99 Fake news always gonna fake, eh?
- fragmede 3y ago> Multimedia being, as of this writing, insufficiently advanced to permit me to embed two hours of video in this book. 1992!
- alliao 3y agoI 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.
- femto 3y agoThe 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.
- noir_lord 3y agoTrue 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).
- gtirloni 3y agoI'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.
- ephaeton 3y agowhen 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...
- skrebbel 3y agoThe “X has died” post usually goes to the top pretty fast, making it rather obvious.
- ephaeton 3y ago"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.
- cronix 3y agoI 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).
- rurban 3y agoBut that had nothing todo with John. He already left before Autodesk bought 3D Studio.
- JamieClay 3y agoFWIW: 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.
- DamonHD 3y agoAh. I interacted with him a little for HotBits, and provided my own public random number (entropy pool) source for a while.
- zmb_ 3y agoHotBits 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.
- bobim 3y agoWild 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_2014-03-14.html https://www.fourmilab.ch/images/album/2014-03-14/concert_b_2...
- guerrilla 3y agoI 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.
- bobim 3y agoFrom 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.
- meekaaku 3y agoI 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.
- joelegner 3y agoI 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.
- pavlov 3y agoA 2008 interview with John Walker: https://through-the-interface.typepad.com/through_the_interface/2008/09/an-interview-wi.html 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)
- DonHopkins 3y agoI 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/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/classic/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/classic/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/homeplanet/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/homeplanet/ https://www.rudyrucker.com/oldhomepage/cellab.htm 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/ 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 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 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=4559 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=RnZWJV1_wKI Cellular Automata by Rudy Rucker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyZUzakG3bE 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_the_cam6_cellular_automata_machine/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Forth/comments/zm0ggl/programming_t...
- maxglute 3y agoI 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.
- jacquesm 3y agoOh 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/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/
- jacquesm 3y agoAnd just in case you never came across it: https://through-the-interface.typepad.com/through_the_interface/2008/09/an-interview-wi.html https://through-the-interface.typepad.com/through_the_interf... A great interview with him.
- fallingknife 3y agoAlso The Internet Slum https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/netslum/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/netslum/
- happytiger 3y agoSafe travels old friend. Thank you for all you did and who you were.
- 51Cards 3y agoI 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.
- 93po 3y agoThat's a really cool story, thank you for sharing
- jimmydddd 3y agoGreat 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! :-)
- disqard 3y ago(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)
- adamgordonbell 3y agoI 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/ https://trendweight.com/
- rockdiesel 3y agoIf 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/ https://macrofactorapp.com/
- adamgordonbell 3y agoVery 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.
- acjohnson55 3y agoThat'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.
- specialist 3y agoDarn. 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 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.
- Animats 3y ago> 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.
- chasd00 3y agoOne 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
- jabowery 3y agoXanadu, 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/ https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/
- djmips 3y agoWhat's the real reason Xanadu failed to become the WWW?
- mmcdermott 3y agoI 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.
- jabowery 3y agoOne 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?
- BrendanEich 3y agoNot "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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0ZWtsYyX8E HOPL paper: https://hopl4.sigplan.org/details/hopl-4-papers/10/JavaScript-The-First-20-Years https://hopl4.sigplan.org/details/hopl-4-papers/10/JavaScrip...
- tohnjitor 3y agoEven after advent of modern parametric modelers like SolidWorks and Inventor, AutoCAD is still tremendously useful.
- fghorow 3y agoMy all-time favorite website is his "Bending Spacetime in the Basement"[1]. RIP John Walker. [1] https://www.fourmilab.ch/gravitation/foobar/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/gravitation/foobar/
- Khelavaster 3y agoWalker died walking :(
- paledot 3y agoUsually 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.)
- throwawayaloo 3y agoI 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.
- shaunxcode 3y agoI 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.
- karbak 3y ago"We'll Return, After This Message" is one of my all-time favorite short stories: https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/sftriple/gpic.html https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/sftriple/gpic.html
- thenobsta 3y agoI'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.
- kimi 3y agoThe 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".
- bhanu423 3y agoI am in tears, hearing these kind words.. I finally have a hero that I can look upto.
- walker-rip 3y agojohn 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/ https://fourmilab.ch/annoyance-filter/ neural network code & explainer for c64: https://fourmilab.ch/documents/commodore/BrainSim/ https://fourmilab.ch/documents/commodore/BrainSim/ program for knuth-style bible study: https://fourmilab.ch/etexts/www/BibleStrat/ 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/ https://fourmilab.ch/webtools/MindGrenade/ a very good primer on probability & stats, with a great references section: https://fourmilab.ch/rpkp/experiments/statistics.html 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/ https://fourmilab.ch/rpkp/ one approach to avoiding low-quality content on the internet: https://fourmilab.ch/documents/strikeout/ https://fourmilab.ch/documents/strikeout/ recipe collection: https://fourmilab.ch/documents/meals/ https://fourmilab.ch/documents/meals/ reverse engineering a weird californian cheese brand: https://fourmilab.ch/chez-nuke/SubMarie/ https://fourmilab.ch/chez-nuke/SubMarie/ bending spacetime in the basement: https://fourmilab.ch/gravitation/foobar/ https://fourmilab.ch/gravitation/foobar/ the most succinct introduction to rocket science: https://fourmilab.ch/documents/rocket_science/ https://fourmilab.ch/documents/rocket_science/ smartalloc: eliminating the problem of memory leaks in c: https://fourmilab.ch/smartall/ 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 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 https://www.fourmilab.ch/fbench/ffbench.html
- 3y ago
- JamieClay 3y agoAutodesk 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.
- theoa 3y agoHi 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
- josh_gordon 3y ago[dead]
- mikevp 3y agosigh 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.)
- msisk6 3y agoI 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.
- jimmydddd 3y agoJohn 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.
- stevesi 3y agoHis 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 https://x.com/stevesi/status/1755737707857555775.
- pipogld 3y agoOk, 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??
- jdougan 3y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39225011 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.
- rdl 3y agoI 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.
- remoorejr 3y agoRIP 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.
- nmenu 3y agoRIP 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
- Duff_Kurland 3y agoI 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.
- theoa 3y agoHi 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