John Walker (programmer)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other persons named John Walker, see John Walker (disambiguation).

John Walker (born ca. 1950) is a computer programmer and a co-founder of the computer-aided design software company Autodesk, and a co-author of early versions of AutoCAD, a product which Autodesk originally acquired from programmer Michael Riddle.

Before Autodesk, John founded a hardware integration manufacturing company called Marinchip. Among other things, Marinchip pioneered the translation of numerous computer language compilers to Intel platforms.

John Walker moved to Switzerland in 1991, after having lived almost twenty years in California. He now engages in projects at Fourmilab, including a hardware random number generator called HotBits^[1] and his Earth and Moon viewer.^[2] John is also known for his efforts in the 196 Palindrome Quest, by taking it to 1,000,000 digits.

John Walker's interest for artificial life prompted him to hire Rudy Rucker, a mathematician and science fiction author, for work on Cellular Automata software. Rudy later drew from his experience at Autodesk, in the Silicon Valley, for his novel The Hacker and the Ants where one of the characters is loosely based on John Walker. Part of the action in this book takes place in Switzerland in a very Fourmilab-like setting. Fourmi is the French word for ant and illustrates a facet of John Walker's sense of humor.

Besides programming, John Walker is a social advocate who has written many articles, including a well-known one about Internet censorship called The Digital Imprimatur. He is also known for his book The Hacker's Diet, a guide to approaching weight loss "as both an engineering and a management problem." He gained notoriety during the fall of the Soviet Union for creating a bumper sticker that announced, "Evil Empires: One down, one to go" with the Soviet and US flags.

He makes his home "near Neuchâtel".