"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 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

being 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.