Dr. Clarence Ellis

Dr. Clarence Ellis, also known as ‘Skip’, curiosity for technology was ignited at the age of 15. Skip was offered a role as ‘Computer Operator’ at a manufacturing company called Dove. But when he started the job he wasn’t allowed to touch the computers. His main role was to simply watch over the computers. This was back when computers used punch cards as inputs and outputs and were heavily based on vacuum technology.

Despite this Ellis would spend his free-time at work going through, reading computer manuals. One day, his company had run out of punch cards and needed to use the computers to process payroll by morning. Ellis was the only one in the company who knew how to recycle punchcards so he lifted the hood of the computer and disabled the parity check circuitry — problem solved! After this experience, the company began to seek him out whenever they had technical problems.

Later in life, Skip became the first African-American to earn a Ph.D. in Computer Science and was a pioneer in CSCW and Groupware. Ellis also pioneered Operational Transformation, this technology is used in Google Docs.

Ellis dedicated much of his work in later years to Ashesi University in Accra, Ghana.