Day 20 - Dr. Mark Dean - Father of Interconnected Tech

Hilton Business center

I don't often use business centers in hotels anymore. Back in the day, I found myself in there printing things, sending off faxes, or accessing my emails. These days I travel with a laptop. I have used the business center to print out tickets, but I recently gave in to the last vestige of technology and now I just get my boarding passes digitally. 

It feels like the whole world is one huge interconnected business center at times.


We have Dr. Mark Dean to thank for that.

Mark was born in Jefferson City, TN in 1957. He loved building things from an early age. This should surprise nobody! So many of these incredible engineers I've studied this month had an insatiable desire to build things out of what came to hand.

Mark built a tractor. As a kid, he built a working tractor. His dad helped, apparently, but honestly, what kid decides to build a tractor and then does it?

Unsurprisingly, he was an amazing student, graduating with straight A's from Jefferson High School. Oh, and just in case I am giving the idea that he was a straight-up geeky nerd, or possibly a nerdy-geek, which I have no doubt he was, he was also a gifted athlete.

In 1979 he graduated with a BS in Engineering from the University of Tennessee.

IBM hired him fairly quickly after that, and he spent most of his adult life working with them.

In 1984, Mark Dean teamed up with Dennis Moeller on a project to make it easier to connect computers to auxiliary devices. The end result was that the two of them patented the Industry Standard Architecture or ISA. Basically, what this means is that you can attach a monitor, keyboard, fax, copier, scanner or whatever you want to your PC by simply plugging it in.

color monitor

It also made it possible for you to fit most keyboards, printers, faxes and the like to any type of computer.

That system alone would have been enough to put Dean into the history books as a pretty important inventor. He was just getting started.

His work also led to the color monitor. Some of us are old enough to remember what monitors used to be like before they were in color!

Pretty cool, but not enough, apparently.

In 1999, Dean led a team at the IBM facility in Austin, Texas that developed the first gigahertz chip. This thing does one billion calculations a second.

Dr. Dean holds three of the nine original patents for IBM.

While he was working for IBM, he also got his Masters in Engineering from Florida Atlantic, and then a Doctorate in Engineering from Stanford. You know, because you can never know too much.

In 1996, Dr. Dean was named an IBM Fellow. He was the first African American to be given that honor. (Though, to be honest, that shouldn't have been a hard call to make.)

In 1997 he was given the Black Engineer of the Year Presidential Award. He was also inducted into the National Inventor's Hall of Fame that year.





Dr. Mark Dean - He made the PC what it is today.

#Celeberateblackhistory.