# About Paul Terry Walhus

Paul Terry Walhus is a web builder in Austin, Texas. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, in December 1944, he came to Austin from California in 1980. When Sematech, the consortium of American chipmakers and the Department of Defense that revived U.S. semiconductor manufacturing, set up in Austin in 1988, he was its Manager of PC Support from 1988 to 1991, working hand in hand with Robert Noyce, the Intel co-founder and co-inventor of the integrated circuit who was Sematech's first CEO, to build the hardware, software and network platform for 700-plus assignees from a dozen chipmakers. He founded The Spring, an Austin online community and ISP, in 1990, put it on the Web as spring.com in 1996, and rebuilt it in 2026 as austinspring.com. In 2007 BuzzFeed News profiled him as the original king of Twitter. Today he builds and runs the WholeTech network, about 198 registered domains and 534 public sites, with two engines behind it: AME, which markets a site, and AWE, which designs and builds one. The Whole in WholeTech is the Whole Earth Catalog: in the 1970s and 1980s he lived on The Farm in Tennessee and in Bolinas, California, and wrote reviews for the Whole Earth Catalog and the Whole Earth Software Review, and he named his network after that ethos, access to tools. Since its early days he has been a producer and question writer for Alex Lindsay's Office Hours Global, 1,420-plus episodes and counting.

## 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.

## Year by year

- 1944: Born in St. Louis. Paul Terry Walhus was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in December 1944. The rest of that story belongs to the family and is not published here.
- 1966: University of Illinois. Bachelor of Urban Planning with honors, 1966 to 1969, on an academic scholarship: the Andrew Mellon Award, valedictorian, and early computer graphics, Fortran, COBOL, statistics and GIS in what was then the Department of Computer Science and Urban Design.
- 1970: Urban planner. City planning departments in Louisville, Kentucky, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, through the 1970s.
- 1970s: The Farm, Bolinas, and the Whole Earth Catalog. Between the planning offices and Austin he lived in San Rafael and Bolinas, California, in Wisconsin, and on The Farm, Stephen Gaskin's intentional community in Summertown, Tennessee, founded in 1971 by a caravan of buses out of San Francisco. He wrote reviews for Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog and, in 1984 and 1985, the Whole Earth Software Review. The Whole in WholeTech comes from there: access to tools, whole-systems thinking.
- 1977: BPI Systems. Customer support and maintenance programmer at BPI Systems, the Austin accounting-software company, 1977 to 1987: his first software job, in the years BPI became one of the early software companies to go public (1983).
- 1980: Austin, from California. He moved to Austin from California in 1980, at the start of the decade in which the city became a technology town. He has been building things in Austin ever since.
- 1987: ComputerLand, Entre, MicroAge. Sales and consulting in CAD and networks, 1987 to 1990, more than $7 million sold. One of those sales calls was Sematech.
- 1988: Sematech: the cold call, then the job. Jay Cash, Sematech's purchaser, cold-called Paul as the consortium set up in Austin. Paul supplied more than $10 million of equipment, about 700 IBM PS/2 Model 70s and 80s, Compaqs, HP and NEC printers and Sun workstations, then joined as Manager of PC Support, 1988 to 1991, working hand in hand with Robert Noyce, Intel co-founder, co-inventor of the integrated circuit and Sematech's first CEO, on the platform for 700-plus assignees from a dozen chipmakers. He established the first Sun Microsystems dealership in Austin and ran a seven-technician service team. His office was next door to Noyce's.
- 1990: The Spring, an ISP and a community. Founded The Spring at International Computer Systems, where he was technical support manager: a dial-in server, a website, and a virtual community that grew to 5,175 members by 1996.
- 1996: spring.com goes onto the Web. The Spring became spring.com, his answer to the WELL, before Facebook, before Reddit, when the Web itself was new. It later ran as spring.net and austinspring.com, and the community lasted until 2014. The same year he registered austen.com; firth.com followed in 1998, wholetech.com in 1999.
- 1996: Haystack Labs, TradeWave, IBM. System administrator and SQA at Haystack Labs, the Austin security company behind WebStalker and NetStalker (1996 to 1997); contract SQA engineer at TradeWave, testing e-commerce security (1997 to 1998); then system administrator in IBM's User-Centered Design group at IBM/Tivoli in Austin, also webmaster and software verification engineer (1998 to 2000).
- 2000: Unix, then WholeTech. Unix systems administration lead for a range of clients (2000 to 2002), then senior Unix systems administrator at WholeTech.com (2002 to 2007): Linux, Verity search, and video production and uplinking for clients including Bloomberg News.
- 2006: The Hotel San José. 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 hotel's wifi up, ran the reservation system, ran the point-of-sale systems for both Jo's Coffee locations (the famous South Congress stand and the one downtown), and looked after Liz Lambert's own Mac laptop and iPhone, a detail he is still proud of. Rock bands stayed at the hotel, the Talking Heads among them, and everything had to keep working for guests like them. He also ended up at parties with the cast of The L Word. His summary of the era: pretty wild.
- 2007: AustinSpring, TexasCoworking, and Twitter. Senior web developer and consultant at AustinSpring.com from 2007, 250-plus websites since, with austen.com reaching more than 8 million hits a month. Founder and managing member of TexasCoworking.com in Cedar Creek, Texas, from 2007: a 5,000-square-foot live-work-cowork facility about six miles from SpaceX, The Boring Company and Starlink. And, the year Twitter launched at SXSW, the original king of Twitter: BuzzFeed News later recorded that Slate, The New York Times and Salon had named him the most popular man on the service.
- 2008: The YouTube channel. Started in 2008 and still running: hundreds of videos of Austin tech meetups, interviews, conference panels, building tours and, lately, the network itself. Video production and IT project management for the San Jose Hotel (2006 to 2007); special projects for BuilderHomesite (2008 to 2009).
- 2014: The Spring goes quiet. After eighteen years on the Web the original Spring closed. Its archive, and the people in it, stayed with him.
- 2020: Office Hours Global. Producer and question and prompt writer for Alex Lindsay's daily live show for media and event professionals, since its early days: more than 1,420 episodes, live production support and panel coordination, for an audience of 5,000-plus. He still finds the pros hard to keep up with, which is the point of the show.
- 2026: The Spring is back. In April 2026 he rebuilt the Spring at austinspring.com, with the 1996-2014 archive alongside a live community, on ATXbbs, open-source BBS software written for the job.
- 2026: The WholeTech network goes live. On April 1, 2026 the WholeTech network went live with 108 websites. By September it had grown to about 198 registered domains and 534 public sites, built Agents First, with two engines behind it: AME to market a site and AWE to design and build one.
- 2026: Tributes, small businesses and free tools. This year's work: a rebuild for Leadville Offroad Adventures and its next-generation sister site Sledville; the Atlantea graphic novel; ATX Guide; fan and tribute sites for Colin Firth, Jane Austen, Ryan Holiday, Charles Petrie, Ted Nelson and Tosca Gruber; and the AWE Concierge, a free site assistant that runs entirely in the browser.