Editor's Blog
John Walker, on his Fourmilog: None Dare Call It Reason Blog (and more about Walker later), offers up a review/discussion of a book, A Brilliant Darkness about Ettore Majorana, who was part of Enrico Fermi’s lab, where they developed nuclear fission, among other things… and who disappeared mysteriously in 1938.
Walker:
"…on March 26th, 1938, he boarded a ship in Palermo Sicily bound for Naples and was never seen again. Before his departure he had posted enigmatic letters to his employer and family, sent a telegram, and left a further letter in his hotel room which some interpreted as suicide notes, but which forensic scientists who have read thousands of suicide notes say resemble none they’ve ever seen (but then, would a note by a Galileo or Newton read like that of the run of the mill suicide?). This event set in motion investigation and speculation which continues to this very day. Majorana was said to have withdrawn a large sum of money from his bank a few days before: is this plausible for one bent on self-annihilation (we’ll get back to that infra)? Based on his recent interest in religion and reports of his having approached religious communities to join them, members of his family spent a year following up reports that he’d joined a monastery; despite “sightings”, none of these leads panned out. Years later, multiple credible sources with nothing apparently to gain reported that Majorana had been seen on numerous occasions in Argentina, and, abandoning physics (which he had said “was on the wrong path” before his disappearance), pursued a career as an engineer.
"This only scratches the surface of the legends which have grown up around Majorana. His disappearance, occurring after nuclear fission had already been produced in Fermi’s laboratory, but none of the “boys” had yet realised what they’d seen, spawns speculation that Majorana, as he often did, figured it out, worked out the implications, spoke of it to someone, and was kidnapped by the Germans (maybe he mentioned it to his friend Heisenberg), the Americans, or the Soviets. There is an Italian comic book in which Majorana is abducted by Americans, spirited off to Los Alamos to work on the Manhattan Project, only to be abducted again (to his great relief) by aliens in a flying saucer."
Now, about John Walker. He was co-founder of Autodesk, famously successful Sausalito, California-based producers of AutoCAD. And there’s an interesting story about Autodesk that — to the best of my knowledge — has never really been told. My version will be sketchy, completely from memory as the result of hanging out there a few times and knowing many of the people involved.
At some point around 1988, Walker, as head of Autodesk decided to use the company’s wealth to experiment. He let the freaks in.
There was the Virtual Reality project, worked on by Eric Gullichsen among others.
"Cyberpunk" SF writer and math genius Rudy Rucker was hired to create a Cellular Automata program called CelLab, and James Gleik’s Chaos.
Perhaps most interestingly, Ted Nelson, the computer visionary who wrote Computer Lib/Dream Machines in 1974 (the book’s look is very ’60s – ’70s… similar to Whole Earth Catalog) was hired to work on his "Project Xanadu" (R). What was/is Project Xanadu? Well… I always understood it as a hypertextual project linking everything to everything in an ever-evolving and highly intelligent way (and with much more intentionally than… say… Google). But this is what they say about it now. As much as the idea — in the late 1980s, Xanadu brought together an intriguing cast of (frequently anarchistic) characters, many of whom were also getting involved in the Foresight Institute for Nanotechnology and the Extropy Institute, which essentially launched transhumanism as a contemporary meme.
Owen Rowley was also there in some capacity, and those of you who know Owen Rowley (rhymes with Crowley) know just how cool that is.
A monthly speaker’s program featured Timothy Leary and Todd Rundgren, among others.
As you can guess, it was an interesting (and casual) place to spend an afternoon. I’m not sure exactly what happened, but at some point, fiscal responsibility (some might say sanity) returned, John Walker moved on, and Autodesk returned to its core task.
This wild period of experimentation seems to have disappeared into history. It would make a pretty cool movie! (but a Mondo movie would be cooler)…
(thanks to Sherry Miller for sending me the Walker post)
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One Comment
I met Walker in the fall of 1987, when I attended an annual Silicon Valley event called the Hackers Conference. At this time “hacker” meant “intense programmer,” rather than “computer criminal.”
I brought my computer with a cellular automata accerlator card—CAs were a kind of computer graphics that I liked looking at.
I stayed up all night with the hackers, drinking beer, smoking pot, and admiring the weird things on their computer screens. In the wee hours of the night, they examined my cellular automaton machine card and told me how it worked.
And a guy named John Walker remarked that it should in principle be possible to get rid of the card and accelerate the CA programs with pure software. I learned that Walker was one of the founders of a computer compuany called Autodesk. I enjoyed talking with him, he was smart.
When Walker and one of his software engineers, Eric Lyons, showed up at my house in the spring of 1988 with a computer to show me a new Mandelbrot fractal zoom program they’d written, I decided to pursue finding work at Autodesk. The job offer came through in the fall of 1988, and I’d work at Autodesk until 1992.
As Autodesk was located in Sausalito, some seventy miles north of where I lived, I only went there physically about once a week. The rest of the time I’d stay in touch via email, which was something brand new to me.
I quickly learned some painful lessons about the new medium of email. Fortunately, hackers tend to be resilient and forgiving types. As Walker once put it, “Don’t worry too much about flaming me. I have thick scales.”
Going up to Autodesk in person was always a kick. Some days it would feel like grabbing hold of a live electric wire with a million volts coursing through it. They always had the latest software and hardware, and the engineers were weird and smart, with awesomely wild plans.
You can download free versions of the software I worked on at Autodesk— CELLAB, CHAOS, and BOPPERS— at my page
http://www.cs.sjsu.edu/faculty/rucker/#Softwaredownloads
In 1992 the company’s stock price dropped. Autodesk got a new CEO named Carol Bartz, and she closed down the Advanced Technology division…home of the freaks.