Mark Dean

• Born: March 2, 1957
• Place of Birth: Jefferson City, Tennessee

AMERICAN COMPUTER SCIENTIST

Dean envisioned and built hardware that contributed to the successful manufacture and public acceptance of early personal computers. As an engineer and executive, he advanced information technology to perform diverse functions and process and store vast amounts of data.

PRIMARY FIELDS: Computer science; electronics and electrical engineering

PRIMARY INVENTION: Microcomputer ISA bus

Early Life

Mark Edward Dean was born to James and Barbara (Peck) Dean in Jefferson City, Tennessee. His father supervised dams for the Tennessee Valley Authority, and his mother taught in local schools and was a social worker. Dean first attended the segregated Nelson Mary School, where his maternal grandfather, Eugene Peck, served as principal. A mathematically talented child, Dean benefited from advanced lessons in geometry and trigonometry at that school. By third grade, Dean was studying at the integrated Jefferson Elementary.

Dean assisted his father with technical projects at home and saw turbines, generators, and computers that controlled processes at the dams where his father worked. He read Popular Electronics and built electronics kits, including a computer. In eighth grade, Dean realized that he wanted to pursue a career in electrical engineering, specifically designing computers for International Business Machines (IBM). Dean lettered in sports at Jefferson High School, where he studied advanced mathematics and earned outstanding grades. He restored automobiles, a hobby he continued to practice as an adult. Dean’s family advised him and his younger sister Ophelia, who later became an engineer, to disregard people who discriminated against them. Dean pursued his goals despite obstacles, recognizing that his unique talents were often more valuable to people than their racial prejudices.

After he graduated from high school in 1975, Dean enrolled in the University of Tennessee, southwest of his hometown. Receiving a Minority Engineering Program scholarship, he majored in electrical engineering. He alternated attending school and working for Alcoa Aluminum as part of the university’s cooperative program, which was mandatory for scholarship recipients. Dean graduated with honors in 1979 with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. One of his professors encouraged IBM to hire the young man for a research position at its office in Boca Raton, Florida, where engineers focused on personal computer (PC) innovations. Dean’s collegiate experiences shaped his attitude in such a way that, during his career, he provided employment opportunities for people of color and female computer scientists and engineers.

Life’s Work

Dean thrived in IBM’s professional environment. His colleagues, including Dennis Moeller, encouraged Dean’s imaginative approaches to developing IBM’s first PCs and expanding their capabilities, starting with the XT (released in 1983). That work resulted in Dean’s designing hardware for the AT (1984). He enrolled in night classes at Florida Atlantic University to acquire more technical expertise by pursuing a master of science degree in engineering. Advised by Dr. Alan B. Marcovitz in the Electrical Engineering Department, Dean graduated in 1982. His thesis, “Using a Synchronous System Architecture to Build a Low Cost Graphics Terminal,” described how to use cathode-ray tubes to produce and show images.

For IBM, Dean and Moeller created the Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) bus for PCs, their most historically significant invention, which received US Patent number 4,528,626 in 1985. Dean also invented the Color Graphics Adapter (CGA) and a monochrome adapter to enhance PC monitor displays of text and images in black, white, and color. He designed components for the IBM PS/2 Models 70 and 80 and acquired patents assigned to IBM. On March 13, 1988, Dean married Paula Jayne Bacon in Palm Beach County, Florida.

After working ten years in Florida, Dean decided to earn a Ph.D. in electrical engineering to build his IBM career as an administrator and to secure credentials to teach at the university level should the opportunity arise. IBM financed Dean’s doctoral work at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, which he began in 1989. Working with advisers Drs. Mark Horowitz and David L. Dill, Dean wrote a dissertation discussing a computer architecture he designed, titled “STRiP: A Self-timed RISC Processor,” to receive his Ph.D. in June 1992.

Dean next served as advanced systems development director at IBM’s Austin, Texas, research laboratory. His work involved designing systems for PowerPC processors and RS/6000 workstation technology. He continued advancing professionally within IBM. In 1995, he achieved the status of IBM fellow, which recognized his technical leadership in the corporation. He was the first African American selected for that prestigious title. Promoted to director of the Austin research laboratory in 1997, Dean announced the next year that his engineering team had created a one-gigahertz microprocessor. Dean promoted design plans for a versatile electronic tablet capable of diverse communication and entertainment tasks, but IBM did not develop that idea.

In 2000, Dean accepted the position of systems research vice president for IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. He guided engineers designing architecture of the swift Blue Gene supercomputers for complex biotechnology computations. This work appropriated aspects of cellular microprocessor research Dean had directed in Texas. In 2002, he became storage technology vice president for IBM’s Systems and Technology Group in Tucson, Arizona. He contributed to such patented inventions as a magnetic thread data storage device (number 7,206,163). Dean and his wife divorced on June 6, 2002.

Dean’s next promotion resulted in his moving to Silicon Valley in 2004, when he became an Almaden Research Center executive in San Jose, California. He led researchers seeking alternatives to hard drives and searching for strategies to fulfill evolving computing needs. In 2007, Dean went to Africa as an IBM Global Innovation Outlook representative to discuss the digital technological demands of individuals, companies, and governments. He wrote an article, “Mobile Phone, not PC, Bridges Digital Gap,” printed in the San Jose Mercury News on February 10, 2008, which stated that wireless technology with diverse capabilities and resources will replace PCs for global populations to have affordable access to digitized information.

By 2008, Dean was serving as vice president of technical strategy and global operations for IBM Research. Interested in medical applications, he contributed his systems experience while overseeing research, including computer simulations of such physiological processes as protein folding and a project with scientists from IBM and Stanford University’s Center for Probing the Nanoscale enhancing magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) resolution performance to achieve 100 million times more precision than existing MRI technology. Dean retired from IBM in 2013 and joined the faculty at the College of Engineering at his alma mater, the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. An emeritus professor, he conducted research on advanced computer architecture and data-centric computing.

Dean published articles in the IBM Journal of Research and Development and numerous conference proceedings. He belongs to the IBM Academy of Technology and served as a board member for the Computer History Museum. A National Society of Black Engineers volunteer, Dean speaks at high schools and colleges about his inventing experiences and African American engineers’ technological accomplishments. He lives with his second wife, Denise, a former IBM executive.

Impact

Dean designed computers that were the catalyst for the information technology revolution in the late twentieth century. His innovations, specifically graphic display adapters and the ISA bus, improved PC performance and expanded the acceptance and use of computers. Within the two decades after PC technology was introduced in the 1980s, computers no longer were confined to laboratories. PCs became standard tools in businesses and homes, particularly because of features Dean made possible. Widespread use of PCs created employment opportunities in computer design and programming to develop improved systems and software for practical needs and entertainment. Dean’s inventions helped generate billions of dollars from sales and salaries to expand and strengthen economies.

Dean’s technical skills inspired other computer designers who appropriated his ISA bus design, which was available in the public domain, and built clones of IBM PCs. The computer industry expanded to produce hardware, especially desktops, and such peripherals as scanners, printers, and speakers. Faster microprocessors Dean developed also became broadly incorporated. Dean’s inventions for early PCs remained fundamental to twenty-first-century computer designs, with approximately ninety percent of modern PCs containing those components. Variations of the ISA concept he invented continued to be incorporated in computers despite alternatives such as the Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) bus. Dean’s accomplishments continued to play a role in the PC computer world in the twenty-first century, especially in the field of PC gaming.

Dean received numerous honors, such as the 1988 PC Magazine World Class Award, recognizing his contributions. In 1997, he became the third African American to be inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and he was presented with the Black Engineer of the Year President’s Award and Ronald H. Brown American Innovators Award. Two years later, the National Society of Black Engineers gave Dean its Distinguished Engineer Award. Dean was Black Engineer of the Year in 2000. The next year, the National Academy of Engineering elected Dean for membership. Dean was selected as an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers fellow in 2002. IBM rewarded Dean’s contributions with multiple Invention Achievement Awards and Corporate Awards. In 2006, Dean accepted the National Institute of Science’s Outstanding Scientist Award. Stanford University named Dean to its Multicultural Alumni Hall of Fame in 2007. In 2021, Dean was inducted into the Florida Inventors Hall of Fame. Dean was inducted into the Educators Hall of Honor in 2023.

Bibliography

Barber, John T. The Black Digital Elite: African American Leaders of the Information Revolution. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2006.

Governar, Alan. Untold Glory: African Americans in Pursuit of Freedom, Opportunity, and Achievement. New York: Harlem Moon/Broadway Books, 2007.

"Leadership." Computer History Museum, 2023, computerhistory.org/leadership/. Accessed 27 Sept. 2024.

"Mark Dean." National Inventors Hall of Fame, www.invent.org/inductees/mark-dean. Accessed 30 Apr. 2021.

"Mark E. Dean." Florida Inventors Hall of Fame, 2023, floridainvents.org/mark-dean/?doing‗wp‗cron=1682159023.5222899913787841796875. Accessed 27 Sept. 2024.

Poletti, Therese. “IBM Research Chief a Tinkerer and Thinker.” San Jose Mercury News, March 20, 2005, p. 1F.

Reilly, Edwin D. Milestones in Computer Science and Information Technology. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2003.

Ridley, Jacob. “Gamers Have a Lot to Thank Dr. Mark Dean For, and the World's First 1GHz Chip is Only the Start.” PC Gamer, 26 Feb. 2021, www.pcgamer.com/dr-mark-dean-interview-ibm-engineer/. Accessed 27 Sept. 2024.

Walker, Ezekiel, J. "Mark Dean's PC Inventions and Improvements Were Patently Genius." The Black Wall Street Journal, 31 May 2023,theblackwallsttimes.com/2023/05/31/mark-deans-pc-inventions-and-improvements-were-patently-genius/. Accessed 27 Sept. 2024.

Taborn, Tyrone D. “Separating Race from Technology: Finding Tomorrow’s IT Progress in the Past.” In Learning Race and Ethnicity: Youth and Digital Media, edited by Anna Everett. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008.