John Walker, Tech Executive Who Popularized AutoCAD, Dies at 74

Original Article:

Source: Link

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. He was 74. His death, in a hospital, was caused by complications of head injuries 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 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. Although he had little taste for publicity, he became a prominent tech mogul of the 1980s and early ’90s as a founder of Autodesk Inc., once described as “a theocracy of hackers,” which grew to become the sixth-largest personal computer software company in the world.