Jack Kister

Jack Kister (born 1951) is an engineer who worked on the TTL model for the original 68000 microprocessor at Motorola. He later became manager of the group responsible for doing the development systems for the Motorola processors (called EXORciser). In this capacity he wrote the original specification for the Versabus which was employed by the Exorcisor systems.

One of the Motorola Applications Engineers from Europe had the idea of putting the Versabus on a Euro sized PCB/connector. This became the Versa Module Europe, also known as VMEbus. Kister is often credited for being the inventor of VMEbus because it became an IEEE standard.

Kister eventually relocated to Silicon Valley with his family where he was the hardware engineering manager at Tolerant systems, the I/O sub-systems manager at Cydrome, the director of engineering at Wyse Technology for Advanced Systems where he was responsible for the Wyse 7000/Wyse 9000 systems and VP Engineering at Diamond Multimedia.