Mark Dean

Mark Edward Dean (born 1957) is an American inventor and computer engineer who co-created the IBM personal computer released in 1981. Born in Jefferson City, Tennessee, he took a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1979 and joined IBM as an engineer, where he developed the ISA bus with his partner Dennis Moeller, the connection that lets additional components be attached to a PC. Promoted in 1982 to chief engineer of PC design, he holds three of the nine original PC patents, and in 1999 he led a team that built the first gigahertz microchip. He was named the first African-American IBM Fellow in 1995, was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1997 and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2001. After retiring from IBM in 2013 he joined the University of Tennessee as a professor.