Kean Walmsley has now posted part 3 of a 4 part series of interviews with Autodesk founder John Walker who started Autodesk 26 years ago. This has been a great read to understand Autodesk and AutoCAD back in the early days a sort of Autodesk 1.0. Only one more part to go next Friday.

Part 3 teaser excerpts
”From the outset the architecture of AutoCAD was intended to be as open as possible.”

“because they don't have $150,000 for an Intergraph workstation”

“One huge contributor to AutoCAD's success was the book Inside AutoCAD.

“I met Gates and I asked him, "why didn't you come after us?" And he said…"

“AutoCAD, to my knowledge, did something in the software industry that has never, ever happened with any other product. It sold more than a million copies at more than $1,000 a copy.”

“A Wall Street analyst … he said, "they're all going to fail, you're going to succeed, and you're going to succeed because they all under-estimate the power of the franchise and of an installed base. That you have. They don't have community colleges teaching their products, they don't have shops with ten stations that are buying three or four more.”

Go give it a read:

Thank you Kean!