John Walker (programmer)
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John Walker is a computer programmer and the founder of the CAD software company Autodesk.
Before Autodesk, John founded a hardware integration manufacturing company called Marinchip. Among other things, Marinchip pioneered the translation of numerous computer language compilers to Intel platforms.
Some say that John's efforts "propelled" Microsoft to dominance, however this is contested. At the time, there was a "right" way to do things like chip design, board fabrication, and software integration and John was a big part of that - without personally buying into Wintel as some ultimate solution.
John Walker now engages in interesting projects at Fourmilab, in Switzerland, including a hardware random number generator called HotBits (http://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/) and his Earth and Moon viewer (http://www.fourmilab.ch/earthview/).
Besides programming, John Walker is a social advocate who has written many articles, including a well-known one about Internet censorship called The Digital Imprimatur. He is also known for his book The Hacker's Diet, a guide to approaching weight loss "as an engineering problem."
External links
- John Walker's home page (http://www.fourmilab.ch/)
- Microsoft at Apogee (http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/msapogee.html)
- John Walker's essay "The Digital Imprimatur" about the threats of the internet (http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/)