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Mark Dean - IBM

Updated: Aug 24, 2019

Mark Dean (March 2, 1957- Present) is an American inventor and computer engineer. He was part of the team that 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.


Mark Dean (March 2, 1957- Present) was born in Jefferson City, Tennessee. From an early age, Dean showed a love for building things; as a young boy, Dean constructed a tractor from scratch with the help of his father, a supervisor at the Tennessee Valley Authority. Dean also excelled in many different areas, standing out as a gifted athlete and an extremely smart student who graduated with straight A's from Jefferson City High School. In 1979, he graduated at the top of his class at the University of Tennessee, where he studied engineering.


Not long after college, Dean landed a job at IBM, a company he would become associated with for the duration of his career. As an engineer, Dean proved to be a rising star at the company.Working closely with a colleague, Dennis Moeller, Dean developed the new Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) systems bus, a new system that allowed peripheral devices like disk drives, printers and monitors to be plugged directly into computers. The end result was more efficiency and better integration.


But his groundbreaking work didn't stop there. Dean's research at IBM helped change the accessibility and power of the personal computer. His work led to the development of the color PC monitor and, in 1999, Dean led a team of engineers at IBM's Austin, Texas, lab to create the first gigahertz chip—a revolutionary piece of technology that is able to do a billion calculations a second. In all, Dean holds three of the company's original nine patents and, in total, has more than 20 patents associated with his name.




Despite his early success, Mark Dean continued to further his education. He earned his master's degree in ele📷📷ctrical engineering from Florida Atlantic University in 1982. Then, 10 years later, he completed his doctorate in the same field from Stanford University.


Sources:

“Mark Dean.” Biography.com, A&E Networks Television, 22 June 2019, www.biography.com/inventor/mark-dean.

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