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Invisible Black Man
 Dr. Mark Dean
 http://www.math.buffalo.edu/mad/PIX/dean.mark.gifhttp://www.math.buffalo.edu/mad/PIX/dean.mark.gif
 

 "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 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.