Clarence “Skip” Ellis grew up on Chicago's South Side, working a graveyard-shift security job watching over a company's mainframe computers as a teenager — and secretly teaching himself to operate and repair them from the manuals. That curiosity carried him through a mathematics and physics degree at Beloit College and a 1969 Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Illinois, making him the first Black person to earn a doctorate in the field.
At Xerox PARC from 1976 to 1984, Ellis led the team that built OfficeTalk, one of the first groupware systems, combining icon-based interfaces with Ethernet networking to let people collaborate on documents from a distance — laying conceptual groundwork later commercialised in products from Microsoft SharePoint to Google Docs.
He went on to lead research at MCC and Bull S.A., pioneered the field of operational transformation now underlying real-time collaborative editing, and became the first Black person elected a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 1997.
- First Black person to earn a Ph.D. in computer science, 1969
- First Black person elected a Fellow of the ACM, 1997
- Led the team that created OfficeTalk, a foundational groupware system
- Pioneered operational transformation, underlying today's real-time collaborative editing
- Learn the machine even when you're only allowed to guard it.. He taught himself computer operation from manuals during a security guard shift job.
- Build technology that brings people together rather than isolating them.. His groupware research became the foundation of modern remote collaboration.
- Take your expertise back to the communities that need it most.. He spent his last academic year teaching in Ghana on a Fulbright fellowship.