From St. Louis to a desk in Austin: the biography

By Paul, with help. Last revised 2026-09-14. Sematech and Robert Noyce from the public record; the rest is his own account.

St. Louis, California, Austin

Paul Terry Walhus was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in December 1944. He studied urban planning at the University of Illinois (a bachelor's with honors, 1969, on an academic scholarship, with the Andrew Mellon Award and the valedictory, in a department that also taught Fortran, COBOL, computer graphics and early GIS), and spent the 1970s as a city planner in Louisville and Minneapolis. He came to Austin from California in 1980, at the start of the decade that turned a university and government town into a technology town, and he has been in Austin technology ever since: BPI Systems, the accounting-software company that was one of the early software firms to go public; then ComputerLand, Entre and MicroAge, selling CAD and networks. MCC arrived in 1982, Sematech in 1988, and a lot of desks needed computers on them.

Roots: the Whole in WholeTech

Between the planning offices and Austin came the part of the story that explains the name on everything he builds. In the 1970s he lived in San Rafael, California; in Wisconsin; in Bolinas, the small Marin County town on the coast north of San Francisco that is famous for taking down its own highway signs; and on The Farm in Summertown, Tennessee, the intentional community that Stephen Gaskin and a few hundred people founded in 1971 after a caravan of school buses out of San Francisco, known for its vegetarian table, its midwives, and the idea that a community could build its own tools. Then Austin, in 1980.

He also wrote for Stewart Brand. The Whole Earth Catalog, from 1968, put "access to tools" on its cover and taught a generation to look at systems whole; its 1984 and 1985 offshoot, the Whole Earth Software Review, did the same for the first personal-computer software. Paul wrote reviews for both. When Brand and Larry Brilliant started the WELL in 1985 out of that same Whole Earth community, Paul's answer, five years later, was The Spring in Austin. And when he registered wholetech.com in 1999 and, in 2026, named a network of 534 sites after it, the Whole was that Whole: access to tools, whole-systems thinking, and the belief that a person with the right catalog can build most things. Every Whole* hub, WholeReach to WholeAustin, is a page in that catalog.

The Sematech years

It started with a cold call. Jay Cash, Sematech's purchaser, rang Paul, then selling computers and networks for ComputerLand, as the consortium was setting up in Austin in 1988. That one call became the account of his life: about 700 IBM PS/2 Model 70 and Model 80 computers, Compaqs alongside them, HP and NEC printers, Sun workstations, more than $10 million of equipment in all, for a research consortium that did not yet have a building full of desks. Then Sematech hired him to run it.

Sematech (Semiconductor Manufacturing Technology) had been formed in 1987 by fourteen American chipmakers with matching funding from the Department of Defense, at a moment when the United States looked to be losing the chip industry to Japan. Austin won the site in 1988. Its first CEO was Robert Noyce, the co-founder of Intel and co-inventor of the integrated circuit, who led it in Austin from 1988 until his death in 1990. Paul's office was next door to his.

As Manager of PC Support from 1988 to 1991 he worked hand in hand with Noyce to devise the hardware, software and network platform for more than 700 assignees from a dozen member companies, Intel, IBM, AMD, Motorola, Texas Instruments and National Semiconductor among them. He established the first Sun Microsystems dealership in Austin to serve the account ("a lot of paperwork", he says) and ran a team of seven service technicians who kept the PCs and the network running. By the early 1990s the consortium was widely credited with helping American manufacturers regain the lead in chipmaking. In his words: we succeeded. Paul was the hardware and IT backbone at its founding, working alongside a legend.

Austin had two great research consortia in those years. MCC, the computing and AI consortium formed in 1982 under Admiral Bobby Inman, and Sematech, the chipmaking one. Charles Petrie was the first hire of MCC's AI Lab; Paul kept Sematech's machines running. In 2026 Paul built charlespetrie.com, a tribute to Dr. Petrie, who saw it and wrote back to say thank you.

The Austin tech years

Sematech sat inside thirty years of Austin technology work. After it: Haystack Labs, the Austin security company behind WebStalker and NetStalker, where he ran systems and testing (1996 to 1997); TradeWave, testing e-commerce security (1997 to 1998); IBM's User-Centered Design group at IBM/Tivoli, as system administrator, webmaster and software verification engineer (1998 to 2000), on the Burnet Road campus, with, in his words, complete autonomy to research whatever he pleased; Unix administration for a range of clients; and five years as senior Unix systems administrator at WholeTech.com (2002 to 2007), where the work included video production and uplinking for Bloomberg News. Since 2007 he has been the senior web developer at AustinSpring.com, 250-plus sites, and the founder of TexasCoworking.com in Cedar Creek, Texas. The career page lays it out as a resume.

The Spring, 1990 to 2014

The Spring began in 1990 as a dial-in community and ISP that Paul founded at International Computer Systems, where he was technical support manager: a server, a website, and 5,175 members by 1996. That year, when the Web was new and most of Austin was still on dial-up, it became spring.com, a community site for the city. "Spring.com was my answer to well.com," he says. "I was basically the Austin clone of that West Coast BBS." It later ran as spring.net and austinspring.com, and for eighteen years it was where a certain kind of Austinite went to argue, help, and find each other, before Facebook, before Reddit. It closed in 2014.

In April 2026 he brought it back at austinspring.com: the 1996-2014 archive alongside a live community, running on ATXbbs, open-source BBS software written for the job. Announcing it, he wrote: "The Spring is back. In 1996, I started a BBS in Austin called spring.com. Before Facebook, before Reddit."

The network, 2026

Thirty years of registering domains and building sites became, on April 1, 2026, the WholeTech network: 108 websites on that day, about 198 registered domains and 534 public sites by September, every one of them built Agents First. Behind it are two engines, AME, which markets a site, and AWE, which designs and builds one, and the free AWE Concierge, a site assistant that runs entirely in the browser.

The IT guy at the Hotel San José

The most colorful chapter of the resume is two lines long on paper: video production and IT project manager, San Jose Hotel, 2006 to 2007. In life it was this. Paul was the IT guy at the Hotel San José on South Congress, working for its owner, Liz Lambert, the Austin hotelier behind the San José and the Bunkhouse hotels. He kept the wifi up in a hotel full of people who noticed when it went down. He ran the reservation system. He ran the point-of-sale systems for both Jo's Coffee locations, the famous South Congress stand and the one downtown, which meant that when the coffee line stalled, it was his phone that rang. He looked after Liz Lambert's own Mac laptop and iPhone, which he will tell you about with the particular pride of an IT guy trusted with the boss's machine.

Rock bands stayed at the hotel, the Talking Heads among them, and everything had to keep working for guests like them. He ended up at parties with the cast of The L Word. He sums up the era in two words, pretty wild, and then usually changes the subject back to printers.

The original king of Twitter

Twitter launched at South by Southwest in Austin in March 2007, and Paul was on it immediately, and constantly. Slate, The New York Times and Salon named him the most popular man on the service; BuzzFeed News looked him up years later in Catching Up With The Original King Of Twitter. He is still there, as @springnet.

Office Hours

Since the early days of Alex Lindsay's Office Hours Global, the daily live show for media and event professionals, Paul has been one of its producers and its question and prompt writer: more than 1,420 episodes, live-production support and panel coordination, for an audience of 5,000-plus. He says he has an awkward time keeping up with the pros, which is why he asks the questions. On the side he runs afterhours.party, his own scrappy, unofficial "outlaw" project, not affiliated with Office Hours; nobody asked for it; he built it anyway.

The work he likes best is in three piles: working sites for small businesses (Leadville Offroad Adventures and Sledville this month), tributes to people worth a tribute (Charles Petrie, Ted Nelson, Jane Austen, Colin Firth, Ryan Holiday, Tosca Gruber), and tools anyone can use for free.