John Black (engineer)

John A. Black, Jr. spent the first 13 years of his career in industry, as a hardware/software engineer, project engineer, and engineering manager. During that time he and Craig MacKenna coauthored the VMEbus Specification, which has been accepted as an IEEE, ANSI, and ISO standard, and currently serves as the primary backplane architecture standard for the US Military. In 1985 he left Motorola to found his own company (Micrology pbt, Inc) as a consultant, working with start-up companies seeking to offer leading edge backplane-based products based on the VMEbus standard. At the same time Black launched OpenSystems Publishing [http://www.opensystems-publishing.com/] to promote the development of open standards, and to assist start-up companies in introducing products based on those standards.

In 1992 Black compiled and edited The System Engineer's handbook (ISBN 0121028208) which was published by Academic Press. In 2004 he joined the Center for Cognitive Ubiquitous Computing [http://cubic.asu.edu/people/page.php?profile=579&cat=professor&dir=] at Arizona State University as a research scientist.