Dan Drake

Dan Drake worked with John Walker at Marinchip Systems from 1979 on systems built around the Texas Instruments TMS9900 processor. That experience with tight memory and processor limits mattered when AutoCAD had to run inside the constraints of an early 1980s desktop computer.

Dan Drake is a software engineer and Autodesk co-founder, named alongside John Walker in the company's founding records. The two had worked together at Marinchip Systems building early microcomputer systems before Walker proposed the venture that became Autodesk in January 1982. Drake was among the first programmers to commit money and time to it, and he hosted the first founders' meeting at his house in Oakland after the 1985 public offering. His work was on the software itself during the years when AutoCAD went from an experimental drafting tool to the product the company bet everything on. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).