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.

Day 16 - Dr. George Edward Alcorn Jr. Is Out Of This World!

Source

I love outer space. I do. I love looking at pics on NASA's website. I was absolutely in love with the Mars Rover, and I am always geeked out when we discover something cool beyond the boundary of our atmosphere.

Pluto!

I do not pretend to know how any of it works, but I do love to read about it.

So, when I ran across Dr. George Edward Alcorn Jr. I was stoked. I was also flummoxed about much of what he did. Let me explain.

Dr. Alcorn was born in 1940. I could understand that part.

He was not only a brilliant man who graduated with honors from Occidental College in Los Angeles, but also lettered in both football and basketball.

So far so good.

Then, he got his PH.D. from Howard in atomic and molecular engineering in the early 1960s.

Okay, got it.

Mars Rover

He spent twelve years working for IBM and became an IBM Visiting Professor at Howard University teaching electrical engineering.

Okay. Not so hard to understand. Then, he went to work for NASA at the Goddard Space Flight Center.

This is when things get both interesting and completely difficult to explain. Let me start by saying that he holds twenty patents for inventing things.

Most of the things he invented...absolutely unintelligible to me. I can write them out and research them, and then they make sense, but in terms of explaining them to anyone, I would need a dictionary and more space here than I mean to spend on any one inventor though he really deserves it.

To that end, I will explain one of them as completely as I can, give a summary of what another is, and then, if you really want to do it, you can look up all of the other things he's invented.

In 1979 he started patenting things. The first ones had to do with semiconductors for IBM. 

What is a semiconductor?





In 1984, Dr. Alcorn patented a thing that changed the way we look at space....literally.

He filed a patent for the X-Ray Imaging Spectrometer. This thing allowed for the detection of radio signatures at a more distant and accurate rate than previously possible and influenced the continued evolution of imaging devices.

What does that mean?

x-ray Imaging 

"Used with space telescopes and other satellites, x-ray imaging spectrometers provide highly useful data for a wide range of scientific and technical applications. With improvements that addressed structural and performance deficiencies, Alcorn's devices and their descendants have been used to conduct planetary mapping, search for new planets, create star charts to reveal motions of systems, and examine deep space phenomena."

In other words, most of the coolest images we have of distant things in space, all of our information we have as we search for "earthlike planets", the mapping of Pluto, the Giant Earth discovery, and many of those other cool images are possible because of Dr. Alcorn. I have been a huge fan of his work for years, and I had no idea!

In 1999, Dr. Alcorn was awarded the Technology Leadership Award. One of two awards that can be awarded to NASA employees. That was the year he invented the Airborne topographical Mapping System.

In 2015 he was inducted into the National Inventor's Hall of Fame.

Dr. George Edward Alcorn  Fr.

I give you George Edward Alcorn Jr.

A man who has got us closer to the stars!

Celebrate Black History!