{
 "@context": "https://schema.org",
 "@type": "Person",
 "@id": "https://walhus.com/#person",
 "name": "Paul Terry Walhus",
 "alternateName": [
  "Paul Walhus",
  "P. Terry Walhus",
  "springnet"
 ],
 "givenName": "Paul",
 "familyName": "Walhus",
 "url": "https://walhus.com/",
 "image": "https://walhus.com/pub/og.png",
 "jobTitle": "Founder and builder, WholeTech network; producer, Office Hours Global",
 "alumniOf": {
  "@type": "CollegeOrUniversity",
  "name": "University of Illinois"
 },
 "hasOccupation": [
  {
   "@type": "Occupation",
   "name": "Web developer"
  },
  {
   "@type": "Occupation",
   "name": "Publisher"
  }
 ],
 "description": "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.",
 "birthPlace": {
  "@type": "Place",
  "name": "St. Louis, Missouri"
 },
 "birthDate": "1944-12",
 "homeLocation": {
  "@type": "Place",
  "name": "Austin, Texas"
 },
 "address": {
  "@type": "PostalAddress",
  "addressLocality": "Austin",
  "addressRegion": "TX",
  "addressCountry": "US"
 },
 "worksFor": {
  "@type": "Organization",
  "name": "WholeTech",
  "url": "https://wholetech.com/"
 },
 "affiliation": [
  {
   "@type": "Organization",
   "name": "WholeTech",
   "url": "https://wholetech.com/"
  },
  {
   "@type": "Organization",
   "name": "Office Hours Global",
   "url": "https://officehours.global/"
  }
 ],
 "memberOf": {
  "@type": "Organization",
  "name": "Office Hours Global",
  "url": "https://officehours.global/"
 },
 "knowsAbout": [
  "Whole Earth Catalog",
  "web development",
  "Unix and Linux systems administration",
  "Austin technology history",
  "Sematech",
  "bulletin board systems",
  "spring.com",
  "live streaming and video production",
  "social media",
  "Twitter",
  "Agents First",
  "AI agents",
  "automated marketing",
  "small-business websites",
  "coworking",
  "Office Hours Global",
  "urban planning"
 ],
 "sameAs": [
  "https://x.com/springnet",
  "https://www.facebook.com/springtime",
  "https://www.linkedin.com/in/walhus",
  "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCm6hdSWohaJk-CGtSayNQ7w",
  "https://wholetech.com/",
  "https://austinspring.com/",
  "https://texascoworking.com/",
  "https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jwherrman/catching-up-with-the-original-king-of-twitter"
 ],
 "subjectOf": {
  "@type": "WebSite",
  "@id": "https://walhus.com/#site"
 },
 "email": "walhus@gmail.com",
 "email2": "terry@austinspring.com",
 "telephone": "501.365.1001",
 "timeline": [
  {
   "year": "1944",
   "title": "Born in St. Louis",
   "text": "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."
  },
  {
   "year": "1966",
   "title": "University of Illinois",
   "text": "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."
  },
  {
   "year": "1970",
   "title": "Urban planner",
   "text": "City planning departments in Louisville, Kentucky, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, through the 1970s."
  },
  {
   "year": "1970s",
   "title": "The Farm, Bolinas, and the Whole Earth Catalog",
   "text": "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."
  },
  {
   "year": "1977",
   "title": "BPI Systems",
   "text": "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)."
  },
  {
   "year": "1980",
   "title": "Austin, from California",
   "text": "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."
  },
  {
   "year": "1987",
   "title": "ComputerLand, Entre, MicroAge",
   "text": "Sales and consulting in CAD and networks, 1987 to 1990, more than $7 million sold. One of those sales calls was Sematech."
  },
  {
   "year": "1988",
   "title": "Sematech: the cold call, then the job",
   "text": "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."
  },
  {
   "year": "1990",
   "title": "The Spring, an ISP and a community",
   "text": "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."
  },
  {
   "year": "1996",
   "title": "spring.com goes onto the Web",
   "text": "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."
  },
  {
   "year": "1996",
   "title": "Haystack Labs, TradeWave, IBM",
   "text": "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)."
  },
  {
   "year": "2000",
   "title": "Unix, then WholeTech",
   "text": "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."
  },
  {
   "year": "2006",
   "title": "The Hotel San José",
   "text": "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."
  },
  {
   "year": "2007",
   "title": "AustinSpring, TexasCoworking, and Twitter",
   "text": "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."
  },
  {
   "year": "2008",
   "title": "The YouTube channel",
   "text": "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)."
  },
  {
   "year": "2014",
   "title": "The Spring goes quiet",
   "text": "After eighteen years on the Web the original Spring closed. Its archive, and the people in it, stayed with him."
  },
  {
   "year": "2020",
   "title": "Office Hours Global",
   "text": "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."
  },
  {
   "year": "2026",
   "title": "The Spring is back",
   "text": "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."
  },
  {
   "year": "2026",
   "title": "The WholeTech network goes live",
   "text": "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."
  },
  {
   "year": "2026",
   "title": "Tributes, small businesses and free tools",
   "text": "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."
  }
 ],
 "network": {
  "domains": "~198",
  "sites": "~534",
  "flagship": "https://wholetech.com/",
  "hubs": [
   {
    "url": "https://wholetech.com/",
    "name": "WholeTech",
    "description": "The flagship and front door: the whole network, its sessions and its standards."
   },
   {
    "url": "https://wholereach.com/",
    "name": "WholeReach",
    "description": "The AI marketing engine, its editions, and the live test-site network with build progress on every engine."
   },
   {
    "url": "https://wholeseo.com/",
    "name": "WholeSEO",
    "description": "One marketing engine, six industries: it audits a live site and produces content and on-page work grounded in its own market."
   },
   {
    "url": "https://wholeaustin.com/",
    "name": "WholeAustin",
    "description": "Every Austin sector, one index: 149 Austin sites across 85 industry sectors."
   },
   {
    "url": "https://wholeatx.com/",
    "name": "WholeATX",
    "description": "The Austin-metro business guide, ranked by website: 6,284 businesses across 88 industries, scored 0-100 for customers and AI search."
   },
   {
    "url": "https://wholetexas.com/",
    "name": "Whole Texas",
    "description": "Cities, regions, food, culture and the outdoors, from the Hill Country to the Gulf Coast."
   },
   {
    "url": "https://wholevoyage.com/",
    "name": "WholeVoyage",
    "description": "Owner-direct marketplaces: HulloShips for vessels, Thai Villa Exchange for villas, and more."
   },
   {
    "url": "https://wholehomebuild.com/",
    "name": "WholeHomeBuild",
    "description": "Every way a home gets built: hands-on framing, green and passive, off-grid, container, earth-sheltered, stone, tiny."
   },
   {
    "url": "https://wholemagnetics.com/",
    "name": "WholeMagnetics",
    "description": "Programmable and coded magnets explained, with the knowledge network around them."
   },
   {
    "url": "https://wholetx.com/",
    "name": "WholeTech, Texas",
    "description": "The Austin-grounded chapter of a thirty-year web shop. Three decades, one drawl."
   }
  ],
  "engines": [
   {
    "name": "AME",
    "url": "https://automarketingengine.com/"
   },
   {
    "name": "AWE",
    "url": "https://automatedwebengine.com/"
   },
   {
    "name": "AWE Concierge (free, in-browser)",
    "url": "https://automatedwebengine.com/concierge/"
   }
  ]
 },
 "career": [
  {
   "when": "2026 to now",
   "organization": "WholeTech network",
   "role": "Founder and builder",
   "text": "About 198 registered domains and 534 public sites from one desk; the AME and AWE engines; small-business rebuilds; six tribute sites; the free AWE Concierge. Live April 1, 2026."
  },
  {
   "when": "early days to now",
   "organization": "Office Hours Global (Alex Lindsay)",
   "role": "Producer; question and prompt writer",
   "text": "1,420-plus episodes of the daily live show for 5,000-plus media and event professionals: crafts the questions and prompts, supports live production, helps coordinate panels."
  },
  {
   "when": "2007 to now",
   "organization": "AustinSpring.com (formerly Spring.net, Spring.com)",
   "role": "Senior web developer and consultant",
   "text": "250-plus websites designed, built and run; austen.com reached more than 8 million hits a month."
  },
  {
   "when": "2007 to now",
   "organization": "TexasCoworking.com, Cedar Creek, Texas",
   "role": "Founder and managing member",
   "text": "A 5,000-square-foot live-work-cowork facility with six-plus kitchens, about six miles from SpaceX, The Boring Company and Starlink, serving the Silicon Hills tech community."
  },
  {
   "when": "2008 to 2009",
   "organization": "BHI / BuilderHomesite",
   "role": "Special projects consultant",
   "text": ""
  },
  {
   "when": "2006 to 2007",
   "organization": "Hotel San José, South Congress, Austin",
   "role": "Video production and IT project manager; the IT guy",
   "text": "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."
  },
  {
   "when": "2002 to 2007",
   "organization": "WholeTech.com",
   "role": "Senior Unix systems administrator",
   "text": "Unix and Linux administration, Verity search, video production and uplinking for clients including Bloomberg News."
  },
  {
   "when": "2000 to 2002",
   "organization": "Various clients",
   "role": "Unix systems administration lead",
   "text": ""
  },
  {
   "when": "1998 to 2000",
   "organization": "IBM / Tivoli, Austin",
   "role": "System administrator, User-Centered Design; webmaster; software verification engineer",
   "text": "On the Burnet Road campus, with complete autonomy to research whatever he pleased."
  },
  {
   "when": "1997 to 1998",
   "organization": "TradeWave Corporation",
   "role": "Contract SQA engineer",
   "text": "E-commerce security testing."
  },
  {
   "when": "1996 to 1997",
   "organization": "Haystack Labs",
   "role": "System administrator and SQA",
   "text": "Security products, including WebStalker and NetStalker."
  },
  {
   "when": "1990 to 1996",
   "organization": "International Computer Systems / The Spring",
   "role": "Technical support manager; ISP founder",
   "text": "Founded The Spring, a virtual community of 5,175 members; built the website and the dial-in server. It went onto the Web as spring.com in 1996."
  },
  {
   "when": "1988 to 1991",
   "organization": "Sematech, Austin",
   "role": "Manager, PC Support",
   "text": "Worked hand in hand with Robert Noyce, co-inventor of the integrated circuit and Sematech's founding leader, to devise the hardware, software and network platform for 700-plus assignees from a dozen semiconductor companies: more than $10 million of equipment (IBM, Compaq, HP, NEC, Sun), the first Sun Microsystems dealership in Austin, a seven-technician service team. Sematech's fourteen original members held about 80 percent of U.S. semiconductor capacity; the goal was to help the American industry regain its edge. It did."
  },
  {
   "when": "1987 to 1990",
   "organization": "ComputerLand / Entre / MicroAge",
   "role": "Sales and consulting",
   "text": "More than $7 million in CAD and network sales. One of the calls was Sematech's."
  },
  {
   "when": "1984 to 1985",
   "organization": "Whole Earth Software Review and the Whole Earth Catalog (Stewart Brand)",
   "role": "Reviewer and contributor",
   "text": "Wrote reviews for the Whole Earth Catalog and its 1984 to 1985 offshoot for personal-computer software, the Whole Earth Software Review. The Whole in WholeTech traces to this ethos: access to tools, whole-systems thinking."
  },
  {
   "when": "1977 to 1987",
   "organization": "BPI Systems, Austin",
   "role": "Customer support and maintenance programmer",
   "text": "Accounting software. BPI was one of the early software companies to go public, in 1983."
  },
  {
   "when": "1970 to 1979",
   "organization": "City planning departments, Louisville, Kentucky, and Minneapolis, Minnesota",
   "role": "Urban planner",
   "text": ""
  }
 ],
 "skills": [
  {
   "area": "Systems administration",
   "detail": "Linux (RHEL, Fedora), AIX, Solaris, FreeBSD, Unix, Windows Server; TCP/IP, shell scripting, EMC and Veritas clustering."
  },
  {
   "area": "Web development",
   "detail": "LAMP, PHP, CSS, JavaScript, XHTML, XML, AJAX, Apache and IIS, e-commerce."
  },
  {
   "area": "Media production and live streaming",
   "detail": "Adobe Premiere, Vegas, Avid; Zoom broadcasting; question and prompt creation for live shows."
  },
  {
   "area": "Social media",
   "detail": "Early Twitter influencer (2007), podcasting, blogging."
  },
  {
   "area": "Also",
   "detail": "Software QA testing, hardware, technical writing, GIS and CAD."
  }
 ],
 "education": "Bachelor of Urban Planning (Honors), University of Illinois, 1966-1969; Andrew Mellon Award; valedictorian",
 "now": [
  {
   "url": "https://leadvilleoffroad.com",
   "name": "Leadville Offroad Adventures",
   "description": "A rebuild for a real small business: guided snowmobile, UTV and dirt-bike tours out of Leadville, Colorado, plus full-line motorsports repair. Built to the house design bar, with the owner's own content."
  },
  {
   "url": "https://sledville.com",
   "name": "Sledville",
   "description": "The next-generation sister site of Leadville Offroad Adventures: the same tours, with a trip planner and a concierge that answers questions in the browser."
  },
  {
   "url": "https://automatedwebengine.com/concierge/",
   "name": "AWE Concierge",
   "description": "A free site assistant that runs one hundred percent in the browser: no cloud, no API costs, no monthly fee, $0 per question. It reads a site's own pages and FAQ, answers honestly, cites its sources, and hands off to the owner when it does not know. Two lines of code to install."
  },
  {
   "url": "https://atlantea.org",
   "name": "Atlantea",
   "description": "An illustrated graphic novel: a gilled city beneath the sea that can rise from the ocean and go to space."
  },
  {
   "url": "https://atxguide.net",
   "name": "ATX Guide",
   "description": "A curated guide to Austin: neighborhoods, live music, food, the outdoors, festivals and Hill Country day trips."
  },
  {
   "url": "https://charlespetrie.com",
   "name": "Charles Petrie",
   "description": "A tribute to Charles J. Petrie, Ph.D.: first hire of the MCC AI Lab, founding editor of IEEE Internet Computing, Stanford logician, Burning Man airport manager. He saw it and wrote back: \"I had no idea anyone knew or cared. Thank you.\""
  },
  {
   "url": "https://firthfan.com",
   "name": "Firth Fan",
   "description": "Colin Firth: filmography, reviews, news and interviews."
  },
  {
   "url": "https://austen.com",
   "name": "Austen.com",
   "description": "The original Jane Austen fan site, established 1997: all six major novels, a biography, fan fiction archives and Regency resources."
  },
  {
   "url": "https://ryanholidayfans.com",
   "name": "Ryan Holiday Fans",
   "description": "The Stoic of Bastrop: the books, the Daily Stoic podcast and The Painted Porch bookshop."
  },
  {
   "url": "https://tednelsonfan.com",
   "name": "Ted Nelson Fan",
   "description": "A tribute to the man who coined the word hypertext, whose ideas the rest of us are still catching up to."
  },
  {
   "url": "https://toscagruber.com",
   "name": "Tosca Gruber",
   "description": "An independent appreciation of Tosca Gruber, the Austin luxury and waterfront REALTOR, licensed since 1984: Lake Austin, Lake Travis, Westlake."
  },
  {
   "url": "https://walhus.com",
   "name": "walhus.com",
   "description": "This site: Paul's own public page, opened this week."
  }
 ],
 "videos": [
  {
   "id": "sAu_SbYmrY8",
   "title": "Claude Code Community Meetup, Station Austin (August 10, 2026)",
   "description": "The Austin Claude Code Community Meetup, recorded and published on Paul's channel. The June meetup at Capital Factory has a full recap on wholetech.com.",
   "date": "2026-08-12",
   "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAu_SbYmrY8"
  },
  {
   "id": "-j0pPrtUuH0",
   "title": "Build an Autonomous Agent with Claude Fable 5: the nine-layer field guide",
   "description": "A walk through the nine layers of an autonomous agent, the way the network's own engines are built.",
   "date": "2026-07-10",
   "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-j0pPrtUuH0"
  },
  {
   "id": "YanTDPLW0AQ",
   "title": "Voting on Karla Murthy's \"The Gas Station Attendant\"",
   "description": "From his coverage of the Austin Asian American Film Festival 2026.",
   "date": "2026-07-13",
   "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YanTDPLW0AQ"
  },
  {
   "id": "pydooSJyOdc",
   "title": "AAAFF 2026, Faces of the Festival",
   "description": "A short from the festival's red carpet and closing night.",
   "date": "2026-06-30",
   "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pydooSJyOdc"
  }
 ],
 "faq": [
  {
   "q": "Who is Paul Terry Walhus?",
   "a": "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."
  },
  {
   "q": "What is the WholeTech network?",
   "a": "A family of about 198 registered domains and 534 public websites that Paul builds and runs from Austin, Texas. The flagship is wholetech.com. The family hubs are wholereach, wholeseo, wholeaustin, wholeatx, wholetexas, wholevoyage, wholehomebuild, wholemagnetics and wholetx, with clusters across local Texas, media, realty, magnetics, coworking, travel, robotics, tributes and more. Every site is built Agents First, so it is as readable by an AI agent as by a person."
  },
  {
   "q": "What did he do at Sematech?",
   "a": "He was Sematech's Manager of PC Support from 1988 to 1991, working hand in hand with Robert Noyce, Sematech's first CEO, to devise the hardware, software and network platform for more than 700 assignees from a dozen chipmakers: over $10 million of equipment (IBM PS/2 Model 70s and 80s, Compaqs, HP and NEC printers, Sun workstations), the first Sun Microsystems dealership in Austin, and a seven-technician service team. It began with a cold call from Jay Cash, Sematech's purchaser, while Paul was selling for ComputerLand. His office was next door to Noyce's."
  },
  {
   "q": "Where did he work before the network?",
   "a": "City planning in Louisville and Minneapolis (1970s); BPI Systems (1977 to 1987); ComputerLand, Entre and MicroAge sales (1987 to 1990); Sematech (1988 to 1991); International Computer Systems and The Spring (1990 to 1996); Haystack Labs (1996 to 1997); TradeWave (1997 to 1998); IBM/Tivoli (1998 to 2000); Unix administration for clients (2000 to 2002); WholeTech.com (2002 to 2007); AustinSpring.com and TexasCoworking.com (2007 to now). The career page has the resume."
  },
  {
   "q": "Why is it called WholeTech?",
   "a": "After the Whole Earth Catalog. In the 1970s and 1980s Paul lived on The Farm in Tennessee and in Bolinas, California, and wrote reviews for Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog and the Whole Earth Software Review (1984 to 1985). Its ethos, access to tools and whole-systems thinking, is the ethos of the network; he registered wholetech.com in 1999 and named the network after it in 2026. The WELL grew out of the same community, and The Spring was his Austin answer to the WELL."
  },
  {
   "q": "What was the Hotel San José job?",
   "a": "For 2006 to 2007 he was the IT guy at the Hotel San José on South Congress in Austin, working for its owner, Liz Lambert: the hotel's wifi, its reservation system, the point-of-sale systems at both Jo's Coffee locations, and Liz Lambert's own Mac and iPhone. Rock bands stayed there, the Talking Heads among them, and he ended up at parties with the cast of The L Word. Pretty wild, in his words."
  },
  {
   "q": "Was he really the king of Twitter?",
   "a": "In 2007, the year Twitter launched at SXSW in Austin, Slate, The New York Times and Salon named him the most popular man on the service, and BuzzFeed News later profiled him as the original king of Twitter. He is @springnet."
  },
  {
   "q": "What was spring.com?",
   "a": "The Spring began in 1990 as a dial-in community and ISP he founded (5,175 members by 1996) and went onto the Web as spring.com in 1996, before Facebook or Reddit; it ran until 2014, later as spring.net and austinspring.com. In 2026 he rebuilt it at austinspring.com on ATXbbs, open-source BBS software written for the job, with the original archive alongside a live community."
  },
  {
   "q": "Does he build sites for other people?",
   "a": "Yes. Small businesses are the heart of it: this month's example is Leadville Offroad Adventures and its sister site Sledville. The Automated Web Engine (AWE) is how a site gets built to the house design bar, and its free Concierge runs in the browser with no cloud costs. Start on the contact page."
  },
  {
   "q": "Where is he?",
   "a": "Austin, Texas. He was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in December 1944, and came to Austin from California in 1980."
  }
 ],
 "generated": "2026-09-14"
}