Mark Dean (computer scientist)

Mark E. Dean ( born March 2, 1957 in Jefferson City, Tennessee) is an American electrical engineer who led the team at IBM that developed the ISA bus.

Dean's grandfather was a director of a high school and his father overseer in the Tennessee Valley Authority dam. He fell early on by technical talent and built as a pupil his first radio sets and computers. Dean studied electrical engineering at the University of Tennessee ( bachelor's degree with honors in 1979 ), where he was also a successful athlete, and at Florida Atlantic University (Master 's degree 1982). He received his doctorate at Stanford University in 1992. From 1980 he was at IBM, where he soon afterwards with his colleague Dennis Moeller developed the ISA bus, which was central to the development of the IBM PC. He also held three of the nine key patents for the IBM PC. He was then involved in the development of the successor models Personal System / 2 and the Color Graphics Adapter.

From 1997 he was head of the IBM research laboratory in Austin and Director of Advanced Technology Development at the IBM Enterprise Server Group ( which developed the RS/6000-Serie ). At the research lab in Austin, he led the development of the first gigahertz processor. Exceeding the GHz mark was announced in February 1998. The chip was fabricated in CMOS technology and contained approximately 1 million in comparison to former Pentium chips from Intel or Power chips from IBM relatively small number of transistors. The processor was experimental in nature and should demonstrate the feasibility of 1 GHz chip.

He later became Vice President for System Research at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center, vice president of IBM's Storage Technology Group, Vice President of Hardware and Systems Architecture of the System and Technology Group (STG ) of IBM in Tucson and vice president of IBM 's Almaden Research Center in San José. He is currently the CTO for IBM Middle East and Africa.

In 1995, he became the first African American IBM Fellow. In 1997, he was received with Moeller at the National Inventors Hall of Fame. He became a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2001.