John Walker, Tech Executive Who Popularized AutoCAD, Dies at 74
Summary
John Walker, a groundbreaking, if reclusive, technology entrepreneur and polymath who was a founder and chief executive of Autodesk, the company that brought the ubiquitous AutoCAD software program to the design and architecture masses, died on Feb. 2 in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. Mr. Walker was well known in tech circles, not just for his triumphs in business but also for his outsize skills as a programmer — he was credited with developing an early prototype of the computer virus — and as a voluble writer who filled his personal site, Fourmilab, with free-ranging musings on topics as diverse as cryptography, nanotechnology and consciousness studies. As programmers around the country passed around magnetic-tape copies of his game, the only way possible in those pre-internet days, it quickly “spread into successively more protected directories in what today is called a ‘classic Trojan Horse attack,’” Mr. Walker wrote in a 1996 recollection on his site. A 1992 article in The New York Times described Autodesk under Mr. Walker as “a cabal of counterculture senior programmers” who “took their dogs to work and tried to reach a consensus on strategy through endless memos sent by electronic mail.” (In those days, email was still a novelty in the business world.) Outside the corporate world, Mr. Walker churned out articles on all things tech-related for Fourmilab, in addition to posting original science fiction stories, recipes with names like “Hackeroni and Cheese” and a book called “The Hacker’s Diet: How to Lose Weight and Hair Through Stress and Poor Nutrition.” As for life at the upper rungs of the tech industry, he showed little nostalgia.