John Walker, programmer and co-founder of AutoDesk, has passed away. Statement from his family: It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of John on Friday, February 2, 2024. John was born in Maryland, USA to William and Bertha Walker and was preceded in death. John is survived by his wife, Roxie Walker, and his brother, Bill Walker of West Virginia.
John declined to follow his family's tradition of becoming a doctor and attended Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) to pursue a future in astronomy. But after discovering the brave new world of computers, he never looked back. John attended university where he worked at the Project Chi (X) Computing Center, where he studied Computer Science and earned a degree in Electrical Engineering.
John met Roxy on Thanksgiving Day in 1972 and they married the following year. A few months later, Roxy and John drive across the border to John's new job in California. Eventually, he quit his first job and worked at various other jobs in the Bay Area. In late 1976, John designed his own circuit board based on his then-new Texas Instruments TMS9900 microprocessor. This venture led him to Marinchip Systems and eventually to Autodesk.
The beginnings of Autodesk are well documented by John himself in The Autodesk File, and John's story from there is best told in his own prodigious writings. All of this work is systematically organized and published on his website, his Fourmilab. Bill Gates's 1991 memo (PDF): A source of inspiration for me is a memo by John Walker from Autodesk called “Autodesk: The Final Days” (copy available from JulieG). Beautifully written and incredibly insightful. John writes an article wondering if Autodesk is doing the right thing as an outsider because he hasn't joined Autodesk's management team in three years and hasn't attended a management meeting in over two years. Masu. By talking about how big companies are slowing down, not investing enough, and losing sight of what's important, and by using Microsoft as an example of how to do some things right, he explains how Microsoft I was able to touch on a lot of things about what is right and what is wrong. today. Amazingly, his nightmare scenario for getting people to think about what's really important is that Microsoft decides to enter his CAD market, which squeezes us. I'm not thinking about it at the moment because it's too much. Our Nightmare — IBM “attacks” us with system software, Novell “defeats” us with networking and more agile, lower-cost structures, customer-oriented applications, and competitors integrate Windows. Getting people to take action is not a scenario, but a reality.
[…] In the Autodesk memo, Walker talks about the short-term thinking that comes with high profitability. He cites specific examples such as a very conservative approach to free software distribution and a desire to maintain fixed percentages for the wrong reasons. Microsoft set the price of DOS even lower than it is today to encourage its popularity. Can I be just as aggressive today? This is not simply a case of lowering prices. Our prices in the US are where they should be. But the price of success is that people do not allow you to make investments that will give you incredible returns in the future.
