|
Do you know this man? Please read below...
" 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.
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 are 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
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. 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.
PLEASE FORWARD THIS TO EVERY BLACK PERSON YOU KNOW
|