Dr. Mark Dean, he invented IBM's 1st PC

As IBMers induce there trainings in Africa, mainly to invest on the skills set and high education, one specific gentleman is honored to be part of this education initiative whom I think deserves international acclaim and recognition like the Olympic folks. 

Meet Dr. Mark Dean, he is part of the IBM team that flames the African market with a new company specific education outfit to nurture skill set.

Before you end up being optimistic, whining and trolling about what your PC can’t do think about how life would be with the type writer and the manual ledger book entries. Right, I guessed so, I had a chance to catch up with Dr. Dean during one of his business trips in Kenya; he says together with other IBMers, they developed predecessors to the IBM PC.

In those days, Dr. Dean terms the feeling of building systems to be as passionate as ever.

Not only is he the ambassador of spearheading IBM’s skill set development in Africa but he built a work station for his master’s thesis during his studies in Florida. This became one of his systems, that jump started the development of the bus which currently is known as ISO bus.

The ISO bus is the interface that allows one to connect types of devices together for the PC, for instance the modems, printers, keyboards and mice, all the stuff that are plugged in and attached to the PC.

This all happened because the development team just didn’t know any better, they thought they were building this for some fun. At that time IBM aimed at selling 200,000 machines in total but the company ended up selling a billion PCs in a year. Dr. Dean says little did they know that they invented a tool that will help people change the way they work.

The PC become a famous tool, it helped people get things done, it replaced the type writer, people don’t need to do ledgers anymore, basically it solved a lot of little problems and changed the way we do business.

Funny thing about it, Dr. Dean never thought he will live long enough to see something he invented being replaced by something else: the cellphone, technology is moving things rapidly.