Stan Mazor  - Computer Chip Inventor

Having graduated from Oakland High School in 1959, Stan Mazor was pleased to attend a local "commuter" college from his parents home in Montclair. In his 2nd year he lived in the dorm on campus, when the building was new. He dated his wife Maurine while in college who was also from Oakland. In 1960, Mazor was interested in building a 1 man helicopter and had gotten some blueprint plans from a Los Angeles based company. Although Stan majored in math, at SFSU he took some classes in metal shop to learn more about metal working and tried to build some pieces of the aircraft. However, when he was married in 1962, he agreed with his wife to give up that hobby.  It was soon replaced when he was "bit by the computer bug" -- and learned to program the IBM 1620 computer on SFSU campus. He also became a student assistant to professor Levitt and helped other students to use the computer system. Mazor left school in 1964 to become a programmer, at Fairchild in Mt. View, which led him into computer design and finally joining Intel in 1969 working on early Intel microcomputer architecture and design. This was before there was "computer science" and most of what he learned was from 3 courses in school from professors Chapin, Levitt, and Williams. He learned about computer architecture from reading other computer manuals.

Mazor worked as a computer designer at Intel for 6 years, but in 1975 moved to Brussels, as an application engineer helping customers to use Intel products. When he returned home to California in 1976, he started his industry teaching career, in which he has been active the past 25 years. Stan interested in teaching because learned about it from the excellent SFSU teachers, especially professors Frank Sheehan and Frank Williams. Teaching in industry is quite different than college--no grades, 1 week classes, and students are customers.

Some interesting teaching assignments took him to South Africa, Stockholm, and Nanjing. Since China was quite exotic and different than California in the early 80's, he enjoyed his trip to Nanjing the most.

His recent hobbies are cooking and castle design. He particularly likes Norman style castles and French cooking. When Stan was on his assignments in Europe and Asia, he had a chance to learn about other cooking styles and building architecture. He also took a class in making "Peking" style duck.

Stan and Maurine have two sons who are both musicians. Mike lives in NY and plays jazz and Mark lives in Concord and plays trumpet.

Although Mazor and his teammates, M. Hoff and F. Faggin, worked on the first microcomputers 25 years ago, they have recently been given some recognition including: The Inventor's Hall of Fame, The Ron Brown Award, and the Kyoto Prize. They are glad that their chips have been useful and hopefully improved the quality of life, and they appreciate the recognition they received. He thought that it was nice to recently be inducted into the SFSU Alumni Hall of Fame.


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