Celebrating Black History Month at Epos Now
This October, we're celebrating Black History Month in the Epos Now offices, a brilliant opportunity to recognise the history, achievements, and culture of Black communities in the UK and around the world, and to honour the colleagues who make Epos Now the diverse business that it is.
This morning we kicked off our celebrations with delicious brownies from Good Cake Day, a Black-owned luxury cake studio and bakery founded by Chinelo Awa. Our teams will be coming together throughout the month, sharing stories and learning more about one another along the way.
And in tech specifically, we owe so much to Black pioneers whose work in computing, communications, and payments helped build the world we work in every day. This month, we want to shine a light on a few of them.
The pioneers behind everyday tech
Mark Dean: the personal computer
Every time a till links up to a receipt printer or card reader, it builds on ideas that computer scientist Mark Dean helped pioneer. Mark was part of the IBM team that created the original IBM PC, where he co-invented the ISA bus, which let computers connect to plug-in devices like printers and keyboards, and later led the team that built the first gigahertz computer chip.
Marian Croak: calls and data over the internet
Dr Marian Croak holds more than 200 patents, many of them in Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), the technology that turns voice into data sent over the internet. She also developed text-to-donate, which changed how charities raise money after disasters – and received the 2013 Thomas Edison Patent Award for this technology, which raised more than $43 million in donations for relief organisations via text message.
Her work underpins the cloud-connected systems that businesses, including ours, rely on.
Gerald "Jerry" Lawson: plug-in software
Jerry Lawson led the development of the Fairchild Channel F, the first home video game console to use interchangeable cartridges. The idea that one piece of hardware can run different software is something every modern device, from game consoles to EPOS systems, now takes for granted.
Katherine Johnson and Dorothy Vaughan: the human computers
At NASA, mathematician Katherine Johnson hand-calculated the flight paths that sent astronauts into orbit and to the Moon, trajectories so precise that John Glenn (the first American to orbit the Earth) reportedly asked her to personally verify the numbers before his flight, even though a computer had already run them. Her colleague Dorothy Vaughan saw the shift to machines coming before most people did, so rather than resist it, she taught herself and her team the FORTRAN programming language and became one of NASA's first Black supervisors.
Together, their stories capture two different kinds of brilliance: mastery of the work at hand, and the instinct to adapt before you have to.
Gladys West: the maths behind GPS
Mathematician Dr Gladys West developed the detailed models of the Earth's shape that made the Global Positioning System (GPS) accurate. Location technology now powers everything from delivery tracking to the online ordering apps used by restaurants and shops.
Shola Akinlade: payments for growing businesses
Shola Akinlade co-founded Paystack in Nigeria in 2015, making it simple for businesses across Africa to accept online payments. By 2020, Paystack was serving hundreds of thousands of businesses and had caught Stripe's attention, leading to an acquisition that year. His mission of helping small businesses get paid simply is one we share.
Dr Anne-Marie Imafidon: the next generation of tech talent
Closer to home, Dr Anne-Marie Imafidon MBE co-founded Stemettes, a UK social enterprise that has inspired tens of thousands of young women and non-binary people into science, technology, engineering and maths. She is helping build a more diverse UK tech industry for the future.
Why it matters to us
At Epos Now, we build technology that helps businesses of every size thrive. The people above remind us that great innovation comes from diverse minds, and that many of the tools we use every day were shaped by people whose contributions were too often overlooked.
Black History Month is a moment to celebrate, but our commitment to an inclusive workplace runs all year round. We're proud of our colleagues, grateful for the perspectives they bring, and excited to keep learning together.
