Celebrating Black History Month:
Black Innovators in Tech!
Black History Month is an annual celebration of achievements by Black and African Americans.
This month is all about honoring and recognizing their central role in the development of history and culture, particularly in the U.S.
To celebrate Black History Month, we want to highlight a few of the innovators who significantly influenced computer science and technology.
Meet the Innovators
Jerry Lawson
Gerald Lawson was an American electronic engineer known for designing the Fairchild Channel F video game console. He spearheaded the team the invented the commercial video game cartridge. Due to his contributions, he is sometimes called the “Father of Modern Gaming”.
In the 1970s, he worked as a field engineer for Fairchild. Lawson’s superiors heard of his work and enlisted him for new projects. Later, Lawson was made Chief Hardware Engineer at Fairchild where he lead the video game division and developed the cartridge we all know and love today.
Lawson continues to be been praised for his contributions to the field. There is even a permanent display of his work at The World Video Game Hall of Fame in New York.
Dr. Marian Croak
Marian Croak is a prolific inventor in the voice and data communication fields, with over 200 patents to her name. She is best known for developing Voice Over Internet Protocols (VoIP), technology that converts your voice into a digital signal, allowing you to make a call directly from a computer or other digital device. Today, the widespread use of VoIP technology is vital for remote work and conferencing, as well as personal communications.
During her career, Croak and her team created a text-to-donate system for charitable organizations that first saw widespread use after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, which raised $130,000. After the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the technology raised $43 million in donations. Croak joined Google in 2014, where she now is vice president of engineering and leads the Research Center for Responsible AI and Human Centered Technology. She also has led a team bringing broadband to developing countries in Asia and Africa.
Dr. Clarenece "Skip" Ellis Clarence Ellis was the first African-American to earn a Ph.D. in computer science, which he earned from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1969. Ellis contributed to the devellopment of the ILLIAC IV supercomputer, icon-based GUI, object-oriented programming languages, Operation Transformation (OT) and "groupware technology". Groupware technology allows several users to collaborate on a document at the same time. That technology helped develop programs like Microsoft’s Sharepoint and Google Docs. Another computer invention Ellis is often credited with is the clicking of icons on a computer screen to send a command to the machine. In addtion to all of this, Ellis devoted himself to teaching under-represented youth the virtues of computer science.
These men and women played an integral role in the development of the modern computer technology that the world relies on today.
We are thankful for their contributions to technology and blazing the path for modern day computer science, development and technology.