I 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.
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.