User:DavidSHRosenthal/sandbox

XXX Dr Bernard L Peuto, the architect of the [Zilog Z-8000] chip, has died. XXX The 16-bit Z8000 was the big brother of the 8-bit Z80, used in the first wave of low cost microcomputers like the Spectrum and TRS80, but had a starring role in its own right. As a 16-bit CPU it powered several Unix systems, including Commodore, Olivetti and Onyx, as well as Zilog's own System 8000 machines.

Astonishingly, the ambitious project began in early 1976, long before the personal workstation was a market.

As Peuto later recalled* at an oral history panel at the Computer History Museum on the development and promotion of the Zilog Z8000 microprocessor: "Now it was extraordinary that we took this gamble to decide that we had to have features that were computer-oriented in a context of a microprocessor design because at the time there were people that thought that microprocessors were logic replacement." XXX Dr Peuto graduated in Paris and completed PhDs at Berkeley in 1969 and 1974. He joined Zilog in 1976, and for the next six years managed 120 component products. He led the design of the MMU, Z Bus, and the Z8. He founded ViewTech in 1984 and led the SPARC graphic team at Sun Microsystems from 1987 to 1991. He was later a member of the executive committee of the Computer History Museum. Dr Peuto was badly injured at a road intersection in San Francisco some years ago. XXX There's a splendid panel discussion on how the Z8000 was created here ([PDF]). XXX

John Harrison Wharton (21 September 1954 – 14 November 2018) was an American engineer specializing in microprocessors and their applications. Wharton designed the Intel MCS-51, one of the most implemented instruction set architectures of all time.

Education and career
John Wharton graduated from Northwestern University with a Bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1976 and a Master's degree in computer science in 1977, having earlier attended Yale University for two years before transferring to Northwestern. He was hired by Intel at the instigation of Tom Rolander, working there for 5 years before leaving to start his consulting company, Applications Research. He was a founding member of the editorial board of Microprocessor Report. He first spoke at the Asilomar Microcomputer Workshop in 1980, along with Carver Mead, Jim Clark, Dave Patterson and Gary Kildall. He first chaired a session in 1983, and became Chair of the workshop in 1985, a position he continued to hold through 1997. He was Program Chair from 1999 through 2017. From 1989 to 2004, with Dennis Allison, he coordinated Stanford University's EE380 course.

J. H. Wharton was the architect of the instruction set of the Intel MCS-51, commonly known as the 8051. The MCS-51 and its derivatives are Intel's highest volume microprocessor, and among the most implemented instruction set architectures of all time.

Wharton was the subject of a 1999 New York Times profile, and a 2001 article about his trips to Fiji to collect debris from the deorbit of the Mir space station. In 1996 he appeared on Late Night with David Letterman.