Chapter 14 Dr. Mark E. Dean 2000 Black Engineer of the Year THE FOLLOWING ARE EXCERPTS FROM THE 2000 BLACK ENGINEER OF THE YEAR AWARDS CEREMONY SPEECHES HONORING DR. MARK E. DEAN. THE THEME OF THE CONFERENCE THAT YEAR WAS “EDUCATION AND THE LEADER’S IMPERATIVE: CROSSING THE DIGITAL DIVIDE.” Dr. John Slaughter, member of the Board for IBM Corporation: The person we are called upon to honor tonight can rightly be called a renaissance man. If by renaissance man we mean a person who exhibits all the virtues of the innovative times in which we live, then surely Dr. Mark Dean qualifies, hands down. Mark received his Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from the University of Tennessee in 1979. He came to IBM in 1980 straight out of school and immediately went to work on the team that developed the original IBM PC in Boca Raton, Florida. What came out of that collaboration was computer technology architecture that allows IBM and IBM-compatible PCs to run high-performance software and work in tandem with peripheral devices. This technology was first integrated in IBM PCs in 1984, and is now a key component for more than 40 million personal computers produced each year. Mark owns a share of three of the original nine IBM patents for that invention, and this was in his first years with the company. The PC AT [Advanced Technology], his next challenge, laid out the industry standard architecture for PCs. The AT was faster and could handle vastly greater amounts of data, and Mark Dean, the architect, wrote the standard. In 1982, Mark was awarded a master’s in electrical engineering from Florida Atlantic University and a Ph.D. from Stanford in 1992. Mr. Al Zollar, president and CEO of Lotus Corporation: After having been with IBM for 15 years, Mark was named an IBM Fellow in 1995, one of only 50 active fellows of IBM’s 200,000 employees, the first African American to be so honored, and the 152nd person ever to receive the designation in IBM’s 87-year history. Mark Dean
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