John Walker

Founder of AutoDesk.

His site is very good and is at http://www.fourmilab.ch/

And apparently can't figure out how to use Excel... (evidence?)

Yet he, through AutoDesk, was one of the forces that propelled MicroSoft to become a dominant platform for business use. (Hmm, spurious, baseless.)

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I especially like the story in the AutoDesk papers about the triumph of accounting over reality.

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Before AutoDesk, John founded a hardware integration manufacturing company called Marin Chip. Among other things, Marin Chip pioneered the translation of numerous computer language compilers to Intel platforms. However, to say that John's efforts "propelled" Microsoft to dominance is kind of like experiencing a good bottle of wine by trying to peel off the label. There was at the time a "right" way to do things like chip design, board fabrication, and software integration. John was a big part of that - without personally buying into WinTel as some ultimate solution. See his predictive and forward thinking: Microsoft at Apogee, http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/msapogee.html

Other John Walker trivia:

• Wrote the very popular program Fang - a file utility replacement for the Univac mainframe file utility program utility (FURPUR). The user guide stated "Programming without Fang is like watch making without a sledgehammer." Fang was possibly the most popular non-Univac Univac program at the time.
• Probably one of the first programmers to have an interview published on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.
• First programmer to have a subroutine documented by Scientific American by Martin Gardner: Pervade which was part of a program called Animal (NML). Pervade was a multi-threaded copy routine that copied NML into all other open directories in the background while you ran the program.
• NML (also stood for Nonsense Manipulation Language) was a multi-user "20 question like" tree database with user interface.
• Recent programming works include "The Ferengi Rules of Acquisition - In Your Palm", http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/ferengi/palm/

-- RichKatz