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America's
High Tech 'Invisible Man'
By Tyrone D.
Taborn
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.
See, Dr. Mark Dean is a Ph.D. from Stanford University . He
is in the National Hall of Inventors. He has more than 30
patents pending. He is a vice president with IBM. Oh, yeah.
And he is also the architect of the modern-day personal
computer. Dr. Dean holds three of the original nine patents
on the computer that all PCs are based upon. And, Dr. Mark
Dean is an African American!
So how is it that we can celebrate the 20th anniversary of
the IBM personal computer without reading or hearing a
single word about him? Given all of the pressure mass media
is under about negative portrayals of African Americans on
television and in print, you would think it
would be a slam dunk to highlight someone like Dr. Dean!
Somehow, though, we have managed to miss the shot. History
is cruel when it comes to telling the stories of African
Americans. Dr. Dean isn't the first Black inventor to be
overlooked Consider John Stanard, inventor of the
refrigerator, George Sampson, creator of the clothes dryer,
Alexander Miles and his elevator, Lewis Latimer and the
electric lamp.
All of these inventors share two things:
One, they changed the landscape of our society; and, two,
society relegated them to the footnotes of history.
Hopefully, Dr. Mark Dean won't go away as quietly as they
did. He certainly shouldn't. Dr. Dean helped start a Digital
Revolution that created people like Microsoft's Bill Gates
and Dell Computer's Michael Dell. Millions of jobs in
information technology can be traced back directly to Dr.
Dean.
More important, stories like Dr. Mark Dean's should serve as
inspiration for African-American children. Already victims
of the 'Digital Divide' and failing school systems, young,
Black kids might embrace technology with more enthusiasm if
they knew someone like Dr. Dean already was leading the way.
Although technically Dr. Dean can't be credited with
creating the computer - - that is left to Alan Turing, a
pioneering 20th-century English mathematician, widely
considered to be the father of modern computer science - -
Dr. Dean rightly deserves to take a bow for the machine 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 system's 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. For most of us, changing the face of
society would have been enough. But not for Dr. Dean.. Still
in his early forties, he has a lot of inventing left in him.
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 the African-American story is part of
the hoopla surrounding the most stunning technological
advance the world has ever seen...We cannot afford to let
Dr. Mark Dean become a footnote in history. He is well
worth his own history book!
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