Mark Edward Dean
Born (1957-03-02) March 2, 1957 (age 69)[1]
Alma mater
OccupationComputer engineer
OrganizationIBM
Parent(s)James Dean, Barbara Dean

Mark Edward Dean[2] (born March 2, 1957)[1] is an American inventor and computer engineer. He developed the ISA bus with his partner Dennis Moeller, and he led a design team for making a one-gigahertz computer processor chip.[3] He holds three of nine PC patents for being the co-creator of the IBM personal computer released in 1981.[4] In 1995, Dean was named the first ever African-American IBM Fellow.[5]

Dean was elected as a member into the National Academy of Engineering in 2001.

In 2000, Mark discussed a hand held device that would be able to display media content, like a digital newspaper.[6][7] In August 2011, Dean stated that he uses a tablet computer instead of a PC in his blog.[8][9]

Early life

Dean was born in Jefferson City, Tennessee. Dean displayed an affinity for technology and invention at a young age.[10] His father, James, worked with electrical equipment for turbines and spillways. Dean's father would often bring him on work trips, introducing him to engineering.[11] When Dean was young, he and his father constructed a tractor from scratch.[12] In middle school, Dean had made up his mind on becoming a computer engineer.[11] He attended Jefferson City High School in Tennessee, where he excelled in both academics and athletics.[10][13] While in high school during the 1970s, Dean built his own personal computer.[6]

Recognition

Dean is the first African-American to become an IBM Fellow,[14] which is the highest level of technical excellence at the company. In 1997, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.[13][15] He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2001.[16] In 1997, Dean was awarded the Black Engineer of the Year Presidents Award.[17] From August 2018 to July 2019, Dean was the interim dean of the UT's Tickle College of Engineering.[18][19]

As of April 26, 2019, April 25 is officially Mark Dean Day in Knox County, Tennessee.[20]

Career and Achievements

Dean graduated with a bachelors in electrical engineering during 1979.[21] Soon after, he got a job at IBM as an engineer.[6][21] His first task at the company was to create a word processor adapter for the IBM System/23 Datamaster microcomputer.[6] During this time, he also created the ISA bus that allowed additional components to be connected to a PC. His work got him promoted in 1982 to chief engineer of PC design, where he worked with a team to develop the IBM PC.[6] In the same year, Dean earned his master's degree in electrical engineering.[21] In 1999, Dean and his team developed a gigahertz microchip, the first in the world.

Dean was the President overseeing the company's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California.[16] At one point, Dean was CTO for IBM Middle East and Africa.[22] He retired from the company in 2013 and became a professor at University of Tennessee.[21] Mark Dean is the John Fisher Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Tennessee.[21][23]

Dean now holds more than 20 patents,[17][24] and his work led to development of the color PC monitor.[25]

Patents by Mark Dean

Name of Patent[26] Patent Number Date of Patent Inventor(s)
Color video display system having programmable border color 4437092 March 13, 1984 Mark E. Dean, Lewis C. Eggebrecht, David A. Kummer, Jesus A. Saenz
Composite video color signal generation from digital color signals 4442428 April 10, 1984 Mark E. Dean, David A. Kummer, Jesus A. Saenz
Microcomputer system with bus control means for peripheral processing devices 4528626 July 9, 1985 Mark E. Dean, Dennis L. Moeller
Refresh generator system for a dynamic memory 4575826 March 11, 1986 Mark E. Dean
Data processing system including a main processor and a co-processor and co-processor error handling logic 4598356A July 1, 1986 Mark E. Dean, Dennis Lee Moeller
Computer system including a page mode memory with decreased access time and method of operation thereof 5034917 July 23, 1991 Patrick M. Bland, Mark E. Dean
Method and apparatus for selectively posting write cycles using the 82385 cache controller 5045998 September 3, 1991 Ralph M. Begun, Patrick M. Bland, Mark E. Dean
Bidirectional buffer with latch and parity capability 5173619A April 21, 1992 Patrick Maurice Bland, Kevin Gerrard Kramer, Mark E. Dean, Susan Lynn Tempest, Gene Joseph Gaudenzi
Control of pipelined operation in a microcomputer system employing dynamic bus sizing with 80386 processor and 82385 cache controller 5125084 June 23, 1992 Ralph M. Begun, Patrick M. Bland, Mark E. Dean
System bus preempt for 80386 when running in an 80386/82385 microcomputer system with arbitration 5129090 July 7, 1992 Patrick M. Bland, Mark E. Dean, Philip E. Milling
Microprocessor hold and lock circuitry 5170481 December 8, 1992 Ralph M. Begun, Patrick M. Bland, Mark E. Dean
Delayed cache write enable circuit for a dual bus microcomputer system with an 80386 and 82385 5175826 December 29, 1992 Ralph M. Begun, Patrick M. Bland, Mark E. Dean
Data processing apparatus for selectively posting write cycles using the 82385 cache controller 5327545 July 5, 1994 Ralph M. Begun, Patrick M. Bland, Mark E. Dean
Connecting a short word length non-volatile memory to a long word length address/data multiplexed bus 5448521A September 5, 1995 Sean E. Curry, Mark E. Dean, Marc R. Faucher, James C. Peterson, Howard C. Tanner
Microcomputer system employing address offset mechanism to increase the supported cache memory capacity 5450559 September 12, 1995 Ralph M. Begun, Patrick M. Bland, Mark E. Dean
System and method for prefetching information in a processing system 5544342A August 6, 1996 Mark E. Dean
Non-contiguous mapping of I/O addresses to use page protection of a process 5548746A August 20, 1996 Gary D. Carpenter, Mark E. Dean, Marc R. Faucher, James C. Peterson, Howard C. Tanner
Self-time processor with dynamic clock generator having plurality of tracking elements for outputting sequencing signals to functional units 5553276 September 3, 1996 Mark E. Dean
Method and system for reading from a m-byte memory utilizing a processor having a n-byte data bus 5603041A February 11, 1997 Gary D. Carpenter, Mark E. Dean
Method and system in a distributed shared-memory data processing system for determining utilization of nodes by each executed thread 6266745B1 July 24, 2001 Philippe L. de Backer, Mark E. Dean, Ronald Lynn Rockhold
Method and system in a distributed shared-memory data processing system for determining utilization of shared-memory included within nodes by a designated application 6336170B1 January 1, 2002 Mark E. Dean, James Michael Magee, Ronald Lynn Rockhold, Guy G. Sotomayor Jr., James Van Fleet
Data storage device for recording to magnetic thread 7206163B2 April 17, 2007 Diana J. Hellman, Mark E. Dean
Method and apparatus for constructing a neuroscience-inspired artificial neural network with visualization of neural pathways 9753959 September 5, 2017 J. Douglas Birdwell, Mark E. Dean, Margaret Drouhard, Catherine Schuman
Method and apparatus for constructing, using and reusing components and structures of an artificial neural network 10019470B2 July 10, 2018 J. Douglas Birdwell, Mark E. Dean, Catherine Schuman
Method and apparatus for providing random selection and long-term potentiation and depression in an artificial network 10055434 August 21, 2018 J. Douglas Birdwell, Mark E. Dean, Catherine Schuman
Method and apparatus for constructing a dynamic adaptive neural network array (DANNA) 10095718 October 9, 2018 J. Douglas Birdwell, Mark E. Dean, Catherine Schuman
Method and apparatus for providing real-time monitoring of an artificial neural network 10248675 April 2, 2019 J. Douglas Birdwell, Mark E. Dean, Catherine Schuman

References

  1. ^ a b "Mark Dean - Biography, Computer Scientist, Engineer". biography.com. 13 January 2021.
  2. ^ "Mark Edward Dean - Dean UTK Resume CV Sept 2017" (PDF). University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Retrieved February 26, 2025.
  3. ^ McCoy, Frank (1999-12-26). "He refined the desktop PC". U.S. News & World Report. Archived from the original on 2012-10-20. Retrieved 2011-08-12. A year later, Dean led a team that built a 1,000-megahertz chip [...]
  4. ^ Maulsby, Richard (1997-10-15). "Four American Inventors to Receive Ronald H. Brown American Innovator Awards" (Press release). United States Patent and Trademark Office. Retrieved 2013-07-11. Dean, just 40, holds more than 25 patents, including three of IBM's original nine PC patents.
  5. ^ "IBM Fellows - United States". www.ibm.com. 2017-04-13. Retrieved 2021-02-21.
  6. ^ a b c d e "Mark Dean Saw—and Built—the Future – The Elective". elective.collegeboard.org. Retrieved 2023-03-30.
  7. ^ "'The tablet is my device of choice': Why PC creator Mark Dean has largely abandoned his electronic child". PCWorld. Retrieved 2023-03-30.
  8. ^ Angel, Jonathan (2011-08-10). "Thirty years later, the personal computer's obsolete, IBM PC designer says". linuxfordevices.com. Retrieved 2011-08-12.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: deprecated archival service (link)
  9. ^ Dean, Mark (2011-08-12). "IBM Leads the Way in the Post-PC Era". Smarter Planet. Archived from the original on 2011-08-13. I recently traded in my PC for a tablet computer [...]
  10. ^ a b "Mark Dean: Early Life and Education". Biography.com. Retrieved 2017-02-18.
  11. ^ a b "Mark Dean: The Groundbreaking Inventor and Computer Engineer". Unique Coloring. Retrieved 2023-03-30.
  12. ^ "Mark Dean". 13 January 2021.
  13. ^ a b "High-tech's Invisible Man'". US Black Engineer & IT. 25 (5). Career Communications Group: 14. February 2002. ISSN 1088-3444.
  14. ^ Carter Sluby, Patricia (2009). The inventive spirit of African Americans: patented ingenuity (illustrated ed.). Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 177. ISBN 978-0-275-96674-4.
  15. ^ "Mark Dean". National Inventors Hall of Fame. Archived from the original on 2017-02-02. Retrieved 2017-02-21.
  16. ^ a b "Mark Dean - Computer Scientist of the African Diaspora". Department of Mathematics, University of Buffalo. Retrieved 2017-02-21.
  17. ^ a b "Mark Dean: Innovation with IBM". Biography.com. 13 January 2021.
  18. ^ "Parker Taking New Role at Office of Science and Technology Policy". The University of Tennessee, Knoxville. 2018-08-15. Retrieved 2018-08-17.
  19. ^ Vandeventer, Brittney (July 2019). "Thank you, Mark Dean". Tickle College of Engineering.
  20. ^ Vandeventer, Brittney (26 April 2019). "Knox County Proclaims April 25 'Dr. Mark Dean Day'". Tickle College of Engineering. University of Tennessee. Retrieved 2019-08-27.
  21. ^ a b c d e "Mark E. Dean". Our Tennessee. 23 January 2017. Retrieved 2023-03-30.
  22. ^ Evans, Bob (2011-08-11). "Personal Computers Becoming Obsolete, Says IBM PC Architect". Forbes. Retrieved 2011-08-12. One of IBM's primary designers for its iconic PC says he's chucked the PC in favor of a tablet [..] Now CTO for IBM Middle East and Africa, Dean [...]
  23. ^ "Personal Computer Inventor to Join College of Engineering Faculty". Tennessee Today. The University of Tennessee, Knoxville. 2013-08-07. Archived from the original on 2013-10-22. Retrieved 2013-10-12.
  24. ^ "Dr. Mark Dean: Computer Inventions". Black-inventor.com. Archived from the original on 2010-07-29. Retrieved 2017-02-21.
  25. ^ "Dr. Mark Dean and the Personal Computer - News - SparkFun Electronics". Sparkfun. 2023-02-21. Archived from the original on 2023-02-21. Retrieved 2023-02-21.
  26. ^ "Mark E. Dean Inventions, Patents and Patent Applications - Justia Patents Search". patents.justia.com. Retrieved 2023-03-30.

Mark E. Dean (born March 2, 1957) is an American inventor and computer engineer. He developed the ISA bus, and he led a design team for making a one-gigahertz computer processor chip. He holds three of nine PC patents for being the co-creator of the IBM personal computer released in 1981. In 1995, Dean was named the first ever African-American IBM Fellow

Leave a Reply