John Walker (programmer)

John Wallace Walker (May 16, 1949 – February 2, 2024) was an American computer programmer, author and co-founder of the computer-aided design software company Autodesk.

[citation needed] In 1982, John Walker and 12 other programmers pooled US$59,000 to start Autodesk, and began working on several computer applications.

[8] AutoCAD had begun life as Interact,[9][10] a CAD program, written by programmer Michael Riddle[11] in a proprietary language.

[15] On his Web site, Walker published about his personal projects, including a hardware random number generator called HotBits, along with software that he wrote and freely distributed, such as his Earth and Moon viewer.

[1][21] Walker's interest in artificial life prompted him to hire Rudy Rucker, a mathematician and science fiction author, for work on cellular automata software.

Rucker later drew from his experience at Autodesk in Silicon Valley for his novel The Hacker and the Ants, in which one of the characters is loosely based on John Walker.