John Walker is a computer programmer and the founder of the CAD software company Autodesk, and co-author of AutoCAD. A computer is a device or machine for processing information according to a program — a compiled list of instructions. ... In computing, a programmer is someone who does computer programming and develops computer software. ... Computer-aided design (CAD) is the use of a wide range of computer-based tools that assist engineers, architects and other design professionals in their design activities. ... Computer software (or simply software) refers to one or more computer programs and data held in the storage of a computer for some purpose. ... Autodesk, Inc. ... A snapshot taken in AutoCAD 2005 while transcribing a curve. ...

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. Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC) (founded 1968) is a U.S.-based multinational corporation that is best known for designing and manufacturing microprocessors and specialized integrated circuits. ...

Some say that John's efforts "propelled" Microsoft to dominance, however this is contested. At the time, there was a "right" way to do things like chip design, board fabrication, and software integration and John was a big part of that - without personally buying into Wintel as some ultimate solution. Wintel is a colloquial, often pejorative, term used to describe desktop computers of the type commonly used in homes and businesses since the late 1980s (these are PC compatible computers running a version of Microsoft Windows). ...

John Walker now engages in interesting projects at Fourmilab, in Switzerland, including a hardware random number generator called HotBits and his Earth and Moon viewer. In computing, a hardware random number generator is an apparatus that generates random numbers from a physical process. ...

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 an engineering problem." Digital imprimatur is a term widely associated with John Walker, due to his article of the same name. ... The Hackers Diet is a book written by John Walker, founder of Autodesk. ...

External links

• John Walker's home page
• Microsoft at Apogee
• John Walker's essay "The Digital Imprimatur" about the threats of the internet