John Harrison Wharton (21 September 1954 – 14 November 2018) was an American engineer specializing in microprocessors and their applications.

[3] He was hired by Intel at the instigation of Tom Rolander,[4] working there for 5 years before leaving to start his consulting company, Applications Research.

[5] He first spoke at the Asilomar Microcomputer Workshop in 1980, along with Carver Mead, Jim Clark, Dave Patterson and Gary Kildall.

The MCS-51 and its derivatives are Intel's highest volume microprocessor,[8] and among the most implemented instruction set architectures of all time.

[2][3] Wharton was the subject of a 1999 New York Times profile,[8] and a 2001 article about his trips to Fiji to collect debris from the deorbit of the Mir space station.