BLACK HISTORY MONTH: DR. MARK DEAN

You may not have heard of Dr. Mark Dean. And you aren’t alone. But almost everything in your life has been affected by his work. Dr. Dean is the first Black-American to become an IBM Fellow which is the highest level of technical excellence at the company. In 1997, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. He is one of the architects of the modern-day personal computer. Dr. Dean holds three of IBM’s original nine PC patents and currently holds more than 20 total patents that all PCs are based upon.

Dr. Dean rightly deserves to take a bow for the computers we use today. The computer really wasn’t practical for home or small business use until he came along, leading a team that developed the interior architecture (ISA systems bus) that enables multiple devices, such as modems and printers, to be connected to personal computers. In other words, because of Dr. Dean, the PC became a part of our daily lives.

He recently made history again by leading the design team responsible for creating the first 1-gigahertz processor chip. It’s just another huge step in making computers faster and smaller. As the world congratulates itself for the new Digital Age brought on by the personal computer, we need to guarantee that Dr. Mark Dean story is part of the hoopla surrounding the most stunning technological advance the world has ever seen.

Dr. Dean never thought the work he was doing would end up being so useful to the world, but he has helped IBM make instrumental changes in areas ranging from the research and application of systems technology circuits to operating environments. Currently, he is an IBM Vice President overseeing the company’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California.