Dr. Mark Dean One of the Inventors of the PC

Is Mark Dean a computer scientist or is he an engineer? In either case he is definitely intelligent. As a boy, he and his father built a tractor from scratch.
One of only a hand few Black students attending his Jefferson City High School, Tennessee, he was both a star athlete and a straight-A student. In 1979 he graduated at the top of his class at the University of Tennessee. Mark Dean's grandfather was a high school principal, his father was a supervisor at the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) Dam. One White friend in sixth grade asked if he was really Black because he concluded Mark Dean was too smart to be Black.

"A lot of kids growing up today aren't told that you can be whatever you want to be," he said. "There may be obstacles, but there are no limits."

Mark Dean, who has been with IBM since 1980, holds 3 of the original 9 patents on the computer that all PCs are based upon. He is now Vice President of Systems in IBM Research. Soon after joining IBM, Dean and a colleague, Dennis Moeller, developed the interior architecture that enables multiple devices, like modem and printer, to be connected to personal computers.

He worked at IBM ten years before he decided to get his PH.D. He earned his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 1992 from Stanford.

In 1995, Dr. Dean was named an IBM Fellow in 1995, one of only 50 active fellows of IBM's 300,000 employees. He was the first Black person to be honored with IBM Fellowship. In 1997 Dean was Vice President of Performance and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, which has under 150 members, for inventing "a system that has allowed PCs to become part of our lives." In 1999, as Director of IBM's Austin Research Lab (in Austin, Texas), he lead the team that built a gigaherz (1000mhz) chip which did a billion calculations per second. In 2001 he was elected member of the National Academy of Engineers (NAE). In 2004, Dr. Dean was selected as one of the 50 Most Important Blacks in Research Science.

Frustrated by the bulkiness of newspapers, Dean came up with the idea for a rugged, magazine-sized device that could download any electronic text, from newspapers to books. The device would also be a DVD player, radio, wireless telephone and provide access to the Internet. It would recognize handwriting (written directly on the screen), be voice-activated and even talk back. Dr. Dean’s philosophy is “if you can talk about it, that means it's possible.