America 's High Tech "Invisible Man"

Dr. Mark Dean

By Tyrone D. Taborn

You may not have heard of Dr. Mark Dean. And you aren't alone.  But almost everything in your life has been affected by his work.

Dr. Mark Dean is a Ph.D. from Stanford University .  He is in the National Hall of Inventors.  He has more than 30 patents pending.  He is a vice president with IBM.  Oh yeah, and he is also the architect of the modern-day personal computer.

Dr. Dean holds three of the original nine patents on the computer that all PCs are based upon.  And, Dr. Mark Dean is an African American. So how is it that we can celebrate the 20th anniversary of the IBM personal computer without reading or hearing a single word about him?  Given all of the pressure mass media are under about negative portrayals of African Americans on television and in print, you would think it would be a slam dunk to highlight someone like Dr. Dean.

Somehow, though, we have managed to miss the shot.  History is cruel when it comes to telling the stories of African Americans.  Dr. Dean isn't the first Black inventor to be overlooked Consider John Stanard, inventor of the refrigerator, George Sampson, creator of the clothes dryer, Alexander Miles and his elevator, Lewis Latimer and the electric lamp.  All of these inventors share two things: One, they changed the landscape of our society; and, two, society relegated them to the footnotes of history.  Hopefully, Dr. Mark Dean won't go away as quietly as they did.  He certainly shouldn't.  Dr. Dean helped start a Digital Revolution that created people like Microsoft's Bill Gates and Dell Computer's Michael Dell.  Millions of jobs in information technology can be traced back directly to Dr. Dean.

More important, stories like Dr. Mark Dean's should serve as inspiration for African-American children.  Already victims of the "Digital Divide" and failing school systems, young, Black kids might embrace technology with more enthusiasm if they knew someone like Dr. Dean already was leading the way.

Although technically Dr. Dean can't be credited with creating the computer -- that is left to Alan Turing, a pioneering 20th-century English mathematician, widely considered to be the father of modern computer science -- Dr. Dean rightly deserves to take a bow for the machine we use today.  The computer really wasn't practical for home or small business use until he came along, leading a team that developed the interior architecture (ISA systems bus) that enables multiple devices, such as modems and printers, to be connected to personal computers.

In other words, because of Dr. Dean, the PC became a part of our daily lives.  For most of us, changing the face of society would have been enough.  But not for Dr. Dean ..... Still in his early forties, he has a lot of inventing left in him.

He recently made history again by leading the design team responsible for creating the first 1-gigahertz processor chip.  It's just another huge step in making computers faster and smaller.  As the world congratulates itself for the new Digital Age brought on by the personal computer, we need to guarantee that the African-American story is part of the hoopla surrounding the most stunning technological advance the world has ever seen. We cannot afford to let Dr. Mark Dean become a footnote in history.  He is well worth his own history book.

First Woman Ascends to Top Drill Sergeant Spot

Command Sgt. Maj. Teresa L. King , the first woman to run the Army’s Drill Sergeant School.
Her new job will have significant influence over the basic training of every enlisted soldier.

By JAMES DAO- Published: September 21, 2009

FORT JACKSON, S.C. — It may come as no surprise that the Army’s new top drill sergeant idolizes Gen. George S. Patton Jr., has jumped out of planes 33 times, aces every physical training test and drives a black Corvette with “noslack” vanity plates.

Command Sgt. Maj. King held a meeting with her first sergeants.

On Tuesday, the Army will make Command Sgt. Maj. Teresa L. King, 48, commandant of its drill sergeant school here. It is a first. No woman has run one of the Army’s rigorous schools for drill instructors.
Petite yet imposing, Sergeant Major King seems a drill sergeant at heart, ever vigilant for busted rules: soldiers nodding off in class, soldiers with hair a fraction too long, soldiers who run too slow. “Are you crazy?” she shouts at one who is walking across a lawn. “Get off my grass!”

The eighth of 12 children, the sergeant major is the daughter of a sharecropper who grew cucumbers and tobacco near Fort Bragg, N.C. Her first job in the Army was as a postal clerk, a traditional position for women in those days.

She says she regrets not having been deployed to a war zone during her 29-year Army career, though she has trained many soldiers who were. And now, in her new job, she will have significant influence over the basic training of every enlisted soldier. Last year the Army consolidated several drill schools into a single campus at this sprawling post, meaning Sergeant Major King, with her staff of 78 instructors, will oversee drill sergeant training for the entire Army.

Famous for their Smokey Bear hats, booming voices and no-nonsense demeanor, those sergeants transform tens of thousands of raw recruits into soldiers each year. It is one of the backbone jobs of the military, and having a woman in charge underscores the expanding role of women in the Army’s leadership.

But Sergeant Major King’s ascension is also a reminder of the limits of gender integration in the military. Just 8 percent of the active-duty Army’s highest-ranking enlisted soldiers — sergeants major and command sergeants major — are women, though more than 13 percent of Army personnel are female. In particular, the Army has struggled to recruit women as drill sergeants, citing pregnancy, long hours and the prohibition against women serving in frontline combat positions as reasons.

Sergeant Major King said one of her priorities would be to recruit more women into her school.
But she pushes back at the notion that she has risen because she is a woman. “When I look in the mirror, I don’t see a female,” Sergeant Major King said. “I see a soldier.”


As a child, she refused her mother’s cooking lessons, insisting on driving her father’s tractor and playing basketball instead. When her siblings got in trouble, she volunteered to take their spankings. It was the sight of a commanding-looking female soldier in a stylish red beret at the fort that inspired her to enlist while still in high school. Within three years, she was sent to drill sergeant school, graduating as one of five women in a class of 30. Willie Shelley, a retired command sergeant major who supervised Sergeant Major King in three postings, said that he once promoted her over the objections of his commander into a position at Fort Bragg that had been held only by men. “Turns out she was about the best first sergeant they ever had,” Mr. Shelley said. “It would not surprise me that she could become the first female sergeant major of the Army,” he added, referring to its top enlisted soldier.

In her clipped speaking style, acute command of regulations and visible disgust with slovenliness, Sergeant Major King prowls the grounds of Fort Jackson, where she was the top noncommissioned officer for a human resources battalion before being promoted to commandant.
“She can always find the cigarette butt under the mattress,” said Patrick J. Jones, a public affairs officer at Fort Jackson. Respect for rules and dedication to training is what keeps soldiers alive in combat, Sergeant Major King says, and she expects drill sergeants to embody that ethic 24 hours a day. “Most soldiers want to be like their drill sergeants,” she said. “They are the role models.”

Yet for all her gruffness, she can show surprising tenderness toward her charges. She describes her soldiers as “my children” and her approach to disciplining them as “tough love.” She wells up with emotion while describing how she once hugged a burly master sergeant whose wife had left him.
“She is confident, no nonsense, but compassionate about what’s right for the soldier,” said Col. John E. Bessler, her commander in a basic training battalion four years ago.

After a stint as a drill sergeant in her early 20s, Sergeant Major King went through a series of rapid promotions: aide to the secretary of defense, then Dick Cheney; senior enlisted positions near the demilitarized zone in Korea; with the XVIII Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg; and at NATO headquarters in Europe.


For a time in her 30s, she was married to another soldier. She got pregnant but lost the baby, and eventually divorced. The failure of her marriage, she said, brought on a period of soul-searching that led her to study the Bible. She was planning to retire and join the ministry when her appointment to the drill sergeant school was announced over the summer. “On the other side, the military life, I was doing so good,” she said. “But my personal life just stunk.” Since her divorce, she added, “I just pour my heart into these soldiers.”
Looking back on her years in the Army, Sergeant Major King says she can think of few occasions where men challenged her authority because she was a woman. “And when they did,” she said, “I could handle it.”

Asked if women should be allowed into front line combat units, she said yes, but only if they meet the same standards as men. While she says most women cannot meet those standards, she believes she can. As if to prove her point, she scored a perfect 300 on her semiannual physical training test last week, doing 34 push-ups and 66 situps, each in under two minutes, then ran two miles in 16 minutes 10 seconds (well below the required 17:36 for her age group.) But before she started her test, she characteristically noticed something amiss. “Can you believe that?” the sergeant major asked no one in particular. “A bag of garbage outside my Dumpster.”