John Cocke
The history of RISC began with IBM's 801 research project, on which John Cocke was the lead developer, where he developed the concepts of RISC in 1975–78. 801-based microprocessors were used in a number of IBM embedded products, eventually becoming the 16-register IBM ROMP processor used in the IBM RT PC. The RT PC was a rapid design implementing the RISC architecture. Between the years of 1982 and 1984, IBM started a project to build the fastest microprocessor on the market; this new 32-bit architecture became referred to as the "America Project" throughout its development cycle, which lasted for approximately 5–6 years. The result is the POWER instruction set architecture, introduced with the RISC System/6000 in early 1990.