retrodroid Posted February 9 Share Posted February 9 John Walker, the founder of computer-aided design software company Autodesk and co-author of AutoCAD, passed away on February 2nd. He was 74. There's an interesting TI connection to the Autodesk story that I wasn't aware of: Quote In late 1976, John designed his own circuit board based on the then-new Texas Instruments TMS9900 microprocessor. This venture became Marinchip Systems, and eventually led to Autodesk. Details: https://scanalyst.fourmilab.ch/t/john-walker-1949-2024/4305 4 11 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Vorticon Posted February 9 Share Posted February 9 Way too young... RIP Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GDMike Posted February 9 Share Posted February 9 Enjoy the goodyears. 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Ksarul Posted February 9 Share Posted February 9 6 hours ago, retrodroid said: John Walker, the founder of computer-aided design software company Autodesk and co-author of AutoCAD, passed away on February 2nd. He was 74. There's an interesting TI connection to the Autodesk story that I wasn't aware of: Details: https://scanalyst.fourmilab.ch/t/john-walker-1949-2024/4305 So far as I know, only one complete Marinchip S9900 computer exists in the wild--it lives in my basement. 8 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
retrodroid Posted February 10 Author Share Posted February 10 3 hours ago, Ksarul said: So far as I know, only one complete Marinchip S9900 computer exists in the wild--it lives in my basement. That's amazing. Sounds like it was a very innovative system for its day. Quote ...part of Marinchip's original concept was a gamble based upon Texas Instruments' strategy in the microprocessor business. Since the TMS9900 was a single-chip implementation of their TTL minicomputer line, I expected them to eventually drop the hammer on these upstarts like Intel and MOS Technology by delivering not only a true 16 bit processor which was competitive with the PDP-11, but also a full suite of software, which included Fortran and COBOL compilers, development tools, etc. at an affordable price, perhaps even free to establish their processor as an industry standard. If and when that happened, Marinchip would be ideally positioned to deliver systems which could exploit that software on a platform which used the much more economical S-100 hardware and its myriad peripherals. That gamble didn't pay off: TI remained greedy and afraid of cannibalising its minicomputer business, and never released the software to TMS9900 users, with the result that they ended up a has-been in both the minicomputer and microprocessor businesses. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pnr Posted February 11 Share Posted February 11 Here's some links about Marinchip Systems from John Walker's website: General intro to Marinchip: https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/marinchip/ Photo's of the S-100 / 9900 boards: https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/marinchip/boards/ Marinchip at the crossroads: https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/e5/chapter2_110.html The 9900 based ancestor of AutoCAD: https://www.3dcadworld.com/autocads-ancestor/ Marinchip morphs into AutoCAD company: https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/e5/chapter2_2.html It must have been a fascinating journey. Most of the Marinchip software runs on the Powertran Cortex incl. its emulator. If we ever find the source code for Interact, it would be cool to make it run on the Powertran. If we find the binary, I think doing a FPGA system with the appropriate S-100 graphics board might be possible. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
retrodroid Posted February 11 Author Share Posted February 11 2 hours ago, pnr said: Here's some links about Marinchip Systems from John Walker's website: General intro to Marinchip: https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/marinchip/ Photo's of the S-100 / 9900 boards: https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/marinchip/boards/ Marinchip at the crossroads: https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/e5/chapter2_110.html The 9900 based ancestor of AutoCAD: https://www.3dcadworld.com/autocads-ancestor/ Marinchip morphs into AutoCAD company: https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/e5/chapter2_2.html It must have been a fascinating journey. Most of the Marinchip software runs on the Powertran Cortex incl. its emulator. If we ever find the source code for Interact, it would be cool to make it run on the Powertran. If we find the binary, I think doing a FPGA system with the appropriate S-100 graphics board might be possible. Thanks for posting these. Those were amazing times, so much incredible innovation in such a short amount of time. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+OLD CS1 Posted February 13 Share Posted February 13 El Reg just ran an article pulling everything together. https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/13/john_walker_obit/ 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sid1968 Posted February 14 Share Posted February 14 Rest in Peace, John. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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