Cocke, John

Cocke, John

(1925– ) electrical engineer; born in Charlotte, N.C. Working at International Business Machines' Thomas J. Watson Research Center (1956), he invented RISC, the Reduced Instruction-Set Computer (1974–75). RISC technology enabled telephone-switching networks to handle 12 million instructions per second. His major research contributions were in systems architecture, hardware design, and program optimization.