John Walker, a reclusive but innovative technology entrepreneur, polymath, and founder and chief executive officer of Autodesk, the company that brought the ubiquitous AutoCAD software program to the design and architecture masses. He died in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, on the 2nd of May. He was 74 years old.
His wife, Roxie Walker, said his death at the hospital was due to complications from a head injury sustained during a fall at home. His death was not widely reported at the time.
In addition to his business triumphs, Mr. Walker has distinguished himself in the technology world for his exceptional skills as a programmer (he is credited with developing an early prototype of a computer virus) and as a prolific writer with a well-developed personal website. It was well known. , At Fourmilab, we explore topics as diverse as cryptography, nanotechnology, and consciousness research.
Although he had little interest in publicity, he became a prominent technology mogul in the 1980s and early '90s as the founder of Autodesk. Autodesk was once described as a “hacker theocracy,'' and the company has grown to become the number 6 company in personal computer software. companies around the world.
In 1982, he gathered together 15 other programming mavericks to found Autodesk. The company's original product was the Office Automation program of the same name, but this was another software product the company introduced that same year that would launch Autodesk into the technology stratosphere.
AutoCAD — “CAD” stands for computer-aided design — was based on a program called Interact, created by another company's founder, Michael Riddle. Thanks to contributions from Walker, fellow founder Greg Lutz, and the rest of the team, AutoCAD will help industries like architecture, graphic design, and engineering by freeing design professionals from using paper and pencil. It will cause a revolution. He uses an inexpensive personal computer to render his creations on the screen.
“He was responsible for the second design revolution,” Rupinder Tara, a California software executive, wrote in a tribute to Walker on the site Engineering.com. What Tara called the “first design revolution” was the creation of his early CAD programs that ran on expensive mainframes and minicomputers. But “it was with his AutoCAD, introduced in 1982 after the advent of the IBM PC, that computers really began to fulfill their promise,” he writes.
Despite AutoCAD's technological advances, Walker was initially unsure of the product's commercial potential because the user base seemed limited. “I mean, look at the number of architects versus the number of people writing documents,” he said in a 2008 interview published on the site Through the Interface.
“We agreed with other companies in the industry that this is a niche product,” Walker said.
His skepticism was quickly dispelled when the company introduced the program to an enthusiastic response at the 1982 Comdex Technology Trade Show in Las Vegas. “From the day this show opened until the day it closed, the booth was absolutely packed,” Walker said. I couldn't go in there. There was a line to see it. ”
John Wallace Walker was born in Baltimore on May 16, 1949, the eldest of two sons, William Walker, a surgeon, and Bertha (Bailey) Walker, a surgical nurse.
Declining to follow family tradition and pursue a career in medicine, he attended Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, initially studying astronomy.
But once he started working at the university's computing center, his career path became clear. Shortly after graduating with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering, he met his future wife, Roxy Smale. The couple married in 1973 and soon headed to California, where Mr. Walker was offered a job at a computer services company and settled in Foster City, south of San Francisco.
Walker, a first-generation hacker, created a self-replicating version of a 20-question computer game called Animal, designed for the giant Univac mainframe computer, and a related program, Pervade, to disseminate it. , which became a hot topic in 1975.
Programmers across the country distributed magnetic tape copies of his game, the only way possible in the pre-Internet era, and the game quickly became known as “what today would be called a 'classic Trojan horse attack.' “It spread to more protected directories,” he said. Mr. Walker wrote his reminiscences of 1996 on his own site. “When I came up with it in 1975, I just called it 'a great idea.'”
A year later, he got a taste of entrepreneurship when he founded a company called MarineChip Systems, built around circuit boards he designed based on Texas Instruments' TMS9900 microprocessor.
But it was at Autodesk that he rose to the upper echelons of the industry. Originally based in the Bay Area in Sausalito, California, the company has quickly grown into a multibillion-dollar company with thousands of employees.
Mr. Walker, an idiosyncratic, left his mark on a company that was far from entrepreneurial. A 1992 article in the New York Times described Walker's Autodesk as a “counterculture senior programmer who brought his dog to work and tried to reach consensus on strategy through endless memos sent by e-mail.” “Group.” (At that time, email was still a novelty in the business world.)
That same year, the Wall Street Journal published a rare interview with Autodesk's “founding genius.” The resulting article noted his habits, including the fact that he did not allow the company to distribute his photos in any way. The reporter noted that his attitude was abrasive during the interview, and insisted that the interview be conducted in front of a video camera, discussing each question and copyrighting the conversation.
At that point, Mr. Walker was no longer running the company. Having led the business from a plucky start-up to a Silicon Valley powerhouse, he grew tired of his day-to-day management and resigned as chief executive in 1986, the year after the company went public. He moved to Switzerland in 1991 and continued to work as a programmer in the company's advanced research and development department until 1994.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by his brother, Bill Walker;
Outside of the company, in addition to contributing original science fiction novels, recipes with names like “Hackeroni and Cheese,” and a book called “The Hacker's Diet: How to Lose,” Walker writes about all things tech-related for Formilab. I am creating a large number of articles. Weight and hair loss due to stress and malnutrition. ”
He showed little nostalgia when it came to life in the upper echelons of the technology industry.
“In 1977, this business fun,” Walker has written a book-length history of Autodesk and published it on his website. “Both the seller and the buyer were skilled technicians like us, and everyone spoke the same language and knew what was going on.”
“Today, the microcomputer industry is run by middle management types who know far more about income statements than RAM organizations,” he added.
