John Walker, technical director who popularized AutoCAD, dies at 74

John Walker, a pioneering if reclusive technology entrepreneur and polymath who was the founder and CEO of Autodesk, the company that brought the ubiquitous AutoCAD software program to the design and architecture masses, died on February 2 in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. He was 74.

His death at a hospital was caused by complications from a head injury he suffered in a fall at home, his wife Roxie Walker said. His death was not widely reported at the time.

Mr. Walker was well known in technical circles not only for his triumphs in business but also for his outsized skills as a programmer (he was credited with developing an early prototype of the computer virus) and as an eloquent writer who shared his personal site filled. , Viermilabwith free reflections on diverse topics such as cryptography, nanotechnology and consciousness studies.

Although he had little appetite for publicity, he became a prominent technology magnate in the 1980s and early 1990s as the founder of Autodesk Inc., once described as “a theocracy of hackers,” which became the sixth largest personal computer software company. company in the world.

In 1982, he brought together fifteen other programming talents to form Autodesk. The company’s original product was an office automation program of the same name, but it was a different software product that the company introduced that same year that would send Autodesk into the tech stratosphere.

AutoCAD – “CAD” stands for computer-aided design – was based on a program called Interact, created by Michael Riddle, another company founder. With the contributions of Mr. Walker and Greg Lutz, who was also a founder, and the rest of the team, AutoCAD would revolutionize industries such as architecture, graphic design and engineering by allowing design professionals to leave their pencils and paper behind. and display their creations on a screen using an inexpensive PC.

“To him goes the credit Second design revolution,” wrote Californian software manager Roopinder Tara in a tribute to Mr. Walker on the site Engineering.com. The “First Design Revolution,” as Mr. Tara called it, was the creation of earlier CAD programs that ran on expensive mainframes or minicomputers. But, he wrote, it was with AutoCAD, which “arrived on the scene in 1982, after the arrival of the IBM PC, that the computer actually began to deliver on its promise.”

Despite AutoCAD’s technological advances, Mr. Walker was initially unsure of the product’s commercial potential due to its apparently limited number of users. “I mean, just compare the number of architects to the number of people writing documents,” he said an interview from 2008 published by the site Through the Interface.

“We felt the same way as the rest of the industry,” Mr. Walker said, “that it is a niche product.”

His skepticism quickly disappeared when the company introduced the program at the 1982 Comdex technology trade show in Las Vegas, to a rapturous response. “From the day this show opened to the day it closed,” Mr. Walker said, “the booth was absolutely packed; you couldn’t get in there. There were lines of people waiting to see it.”

John Wallace Walker was born on May 16, 1949, in Baltimore, the eldest of two sons of William Walker, a surgeon, and Bertha (Bailey) Walker, a surgical nurse.

Refusing to follow family tradition and pursue a career in medicine, he attended Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, where he initially studied astronomy.

But once he started working in the university’s computer center, his direction became clear. Not long after graduating with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, he met his future wife, Roxie Smail. The couple married in 1973 and soon left for California, where Mr. Walker had gotten a job at a computer services company, and settled in Foster City, south of San Francisco.

Walker, a first-generation hacker, made waves in 1975 by creating a self-replicating version of a 20 Questions-style computer game called Animal, designed for giant Univac mainframe computers, along with a companion program, Pervade, to spread.

As programmers across the country distributed copies of his game on magnetic tape, the only way possible in those pre-Internet days, it quickly spread “to increasingly protected folders in what is today a ‘classic Trojan horse attack’ Mr. Walker wrote a recollection on his site in 1996. “When I thought about it in 1975, I just called it ‘a nice idea’.”

A year later, he was introduced to entrepreneurship when he founded a company called Marinchip systemsbuilt around a circuit board he designed that was based on the Texas Instruments TMS9900 microprocessor.

But it was with Autodesk that he would rise to the upper echelons of the industry. Originally based in Sausalito, California, in the Bay Area, it grew into a multi-billion dollar company with thousands of employees.

The quirky Mr. Walker left his mark on a company that was anything but commercial in nature. A 1992 article in The New York Times described Autodesk under Mr. Walker as “a cabal of senior counterculture programmers” who “brought their dogs to work and tried to reach a consensus on strategy through endless memos sent by electronic mail.” (At that time, email was still a novelty in the business world.)

That same year, The Wall Street Journal scored a rare interview with Autodesk “founding genius.” The resulting article noted his idiosyncrasies, including the fact that he would not allow the company to distribute his photo in any form. He was irritable during the interview, the reporter noted, and insisted that it take place in front of a video camera, discussing every question and claiming copyright on the conversation.

At that time, Mr. Walker was no longer running the company. After leading the company from a plucky start-up to a Silicon Valley powerhouse, he grew tired of day-to-day management and stepped down as CEO in 1986, a year after the company went public. He moved to Switzerland in 1991, where he continued to work for the company as a programmer with its advanced research and development department until 1994.

In addition to his wife, he is survived by his brother, Bill Walker.

Outside the business world, Mr. Walker articles about all things technology for Fourmilab, in addition to posting original ones Science fiction stories, recipes with names like “Hackeroni and Cheese” and a book called “The hacker diet: How to Lose Weight and Hair Through Stress and Poor Diet.”

As for life at the top of the tech industry, he showed little nostalgia.

“In 1977, this were business pleasure,” Mr. Walker wrote about the history of Autodesk in a book, which he published on his site. “The sellers and buyers were real technicians just like us, everyone spoke the same language and knew what was going on.”

“Today,” he added, “the microcomputer industry is run by middle managers who know a lot more about profit and loss statements than they do about the RAM organization.”