A CAD Legend Passes: Autodesk founder John Walker (1949 to 2024)

Credit John Walker with the democratization of CAD.

John Walker (white shirt, 2nd from left) during the early days of Autodesk with all the founders, from left to right: Rudolf Künzli, Mike Ford, Dan Drake, Mauri Laitinen, Greg Lutz, David Kalish, Lars Moureau, Richard Handyside, Kern Sibbald, Hal Royaltey, Duff Kurland, John Walker himself, and Keith Marcelius. (Image courtesy of Shaan Hurley.)

John Walker, one of the founders of Autodesk, died in his Neuchâtel, Switzerland home on February 2, 2024, according to an announcement on the Fourmilab website. He was 74.

Saying that John Walker was one of the founders of Autodesk gives credit to all the founders, but it is John Walker, Autodesk’s first CEO, who is most associated with the success of Autodesk, and to him goes the credit for the 2nd Design Revolution. The 1st Design Revolution was CAD itself and it promised that computers would do what designers, engineers and architects did on a drafting table. It was the 2nd Design Revolution, after AutoCAD burst onto the scene in 1982, after the advent of the IBM PC, that the computer actually started to deliver on the promise. Then came the hockey stick curve, the democratization of CAD, the whole of the design community converting to CAD. 

A few years later and fresh out of engineering school, I was to lead the company I worked for into the world of CAD. But it was toward Applicon, not AutoCAD—very expensive software on very expensive workstations. In a room kept dark—though bright enough that customers would be impressed looking in from big windows—were $25,000 workstations. In came AutoCAD and blew the room up. True to its promise, AutoCAD could do 80 percent of what the expensive Applicon workstations were being asked to do, but at 20 percent of the cost. It couldn’t do solid modeling like Applicon. It couldn’t interface with finite element analysis (FEA). But it was good enough most of the time.

John Walker, 42 years after starting Autodesk, with a AutoCAD manual and the Marinchip 9900, the first hardware AutoCAD ran on, at his home in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. Photo: Kean Walmsley.

Walker, with a degree in electrical engineering (Case Western Reserve University) was dabbling in computer hardware when he came up with the idea of CAD for everyone. He did the math: 80 percent of the functionality times a million more users generated more overall value. Sure, the elitists on $25,000 workstations, whether they were using Applicon, Unigraphics on Sun, Apollo or DEC hardware, CATIA on IBM mainframes, or Intergraph’s on Clippers, thought AutoCAD a step backward. But how many of those products are still around? Autodesk, however, flourished.

Autodesk was more than just a step forward—it was a revolution. AutoCAD, with millions of users, is far and away the most popular and most used professional CAD ever created.

Walker stepped down as president of Autodesk in 1986 and left the country in 1991, living the rest of his life in Neuchâtel, Switzerland.

My career in CAD was to survive my initial choice of state-of-the art CAD systems over AutoCAD. I course corrected and went on to teach college students design using AutoCAD by day and teaching professionals AutoCAD in the evening. You might say I was making amends to John Walker.

I’ve met more than my share of CAD leaders. To all of them, and especially, John Walker, I owe my career. My only regret, when it is my turn to step down from my career, will be that I never had the opportunity to meet the leader who launched millions of CAD careers.

Rest in peace, John Walker.