John Walker's history of Autodesk (1994) | Hacker News Reader

John Walker's history of Autodesk (1994)

fourmilab.ch

49 pointsenkiv216 comments

I have read large portions of this in the past. I can't fathom working for a company where one of the top executives put out such lucid, technically correct, and interesting documents.

AutoCad is a truly amazing piece of software. It's Emacs for vectors,§ but in a world where Emacs was flush with cash and could pay a full blown development team for 30 years...oh and buy out Vim and bury its corpse out in the desert [AutoDesk bought Generic Cadd which used a system of two letter mnemonic commands in 1989 and killed it so dead in 1997 it doesn't even have an English Wikipedia entry].

§ With apologies to Stallman for comparing his baby to proprietary licensed software.

I don't know if it's inspired by Generic Cadd, but Autodesk Revit uses two letter mnemonics for shortcuts. MV for move, DR for door, LF for light fixture, VG for visibility/graphics, etc.

AutoDesk bought Revit in 2002. They were inspired by the proprietary file format that prevents direct interop by other vendor's cad software.

Hell, it prevents interop between different versions of Revit. Automatic "upgrade" if you touch a file, and there's no way to save back to previous formats.

But since you can't even buy a copy of Revit anymore (subscription licensing only), I guess that no longer matters.

Anyway, I was referring to the 2-letter command system. I think Revit is the only piece of software I've ever encountered it in.

In so far as I recall, and I never used Generic Cadd in anger, pretty much everything in Generic Cadd was two letter mnemonics. This was back in the days before AutoCad had .pgp files for command aliasing and was just adding drop down menus. The only good options for driving AutoCad with a keyboard were either with the screen menu system that lived in a sidebar like area of the display, or writing AutoLisp and using the bang operator on expressions.

Once AutoCad got .pgp files in R11, then two letter commands were possible...I used "dd" for 'ddlmodes when it was different than 'layer for many years.

Anyway, Generic Cadd was one of the top PC Cadd systems when Autodesk bought them out and then slowly killed them off. I'm not big on the Revit, I upgraded from R14 to Architectural Desktop version 1. Revit's business model always worried me.

Yeah, now that you mention it, AutoCAD does do a fair bit of two letter aliasing. Not quite as directly as Revit's where you just hit the letters and don't need to press Enter.

I'm not a huge fan of Revit either. Thankfully one of my coworkers handles most of what we have to do here (families of our products for architects/designers to use in their projects), though I've still gotten dragged into more than a few discussions about it. Like whether we build our assets in an older version that more people can import but has known bugs in the photometrics display, or if we go to the new one and then have people coming and asking "Hey do you have these for 2011?" and having to remake it from scratch. Ugh.

I've only worked in shops where they licensed AutoCAD LT, which (at least the versions I used) doesn't unlock access to AutoLISP.

It didn't last.

The tone of the place changed radically after Walker left and Bartz came in.

But, to be fair, it was probably inevitable. Once an organization get beyond a certain size it's bound to change.

Still, it can't be all bad -- I know quite a few people that have been there 20+ years now.

While the story may be apocryphal, it is said that John thought that Autodesk began its slide to a "normal" company when they had to hire their first employee with an IQ less than 200.

Let us not forget John's excellent Hackers Diet.

I've been logging weight for years at www.fourmilab.ch/cgi-bin/HackDiet.

Lost around 30 pounds, which made me happy.

I showed the hacker's diet to my wife, and she's lost about the same amount so far. fantastic resource.

John's book is outstanding, a must read for everyone who is even thinking about doing a start-up. Autodesk was an exceptional case, particularly in the early days--but we need many more exceptions like this.

Rad article. The Maya API feels like a bad experiment from 1994 sometimes...

Maya was created by companies unrelated to John Walker's Autodesk.

Who works with someone like this today?

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