“Can you believe it? He was too brilliant that his white friend in sixth grade kept asking if he was really black. For they expected genius to only run in white people DNA.” Grandma said indignantly. Well, joke’s on them, for I wish I had seen their faces when He, Mark Dean, born in 1957 to Barbara and James Dean in Jefferson City Tennessee, became a key contributor to the development of the personal computer. That's right, three of the nine patents of the original personal computer by IBM ( International Business Machines), are registered to Dean. And I guess we should have known he was genius at a young age for he and his father made a tractor from scratch. I think you should write that somewhere Ada, from scratch!!!! And that's not the end of it, in the 1980s, Dean, together with co inventor, Dennis Moeller, developed a micro computer system called Industry Standard Architecture (ISA), a computer bus protocol for 8 bit and 16 bit systems compatible with IBM. In addition, the world's first gigahertz chip was built under his direction in 1999. Dean, to date has had more than forty patents issued with his name and twenty of those are primarily for his innovation in computer engineering. I think we can all agree that being the first African-American to be named the first IBM fellow, named black engineer of the year in 1997 and 2000, inducted into the national inventors hall of fame in 1997 is the last one could for such a brilliant mind.Here lies a man who despite the color of his skin couldn't be ignored for his brain was to loud. "I also was able to demonstrate my ideas to a point where it was hard to argue their viability," Mark Dean once said. Tomorrow I'll tell you about another person that proved difficult to ignore, "the first black millionaire."