Heinz Lienhard (18 June 1937 – 12 May 2020) was a

Swiss Swiss may refer to: * the adjectival form of Switzerland * Swiss people Places * Swiss, Missouri * Swiss, North Carolina *Swiss, West Virginia * Swiss, Wisconsin Other uses *Swiss-system tournament, in various games and sports *Swiss Internation ...

electrical engineer and an inventor.''Heinz Lienhard-Manz''.
Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 20 May 2020, p. 6. Retrieved 5 July 2022. He was inventor of current measuring equipment''Inventor Heinz Lienhard''.
patents.justia.com. Retrieved 5 July 2022. and developer of the programming language PORTAL.

Life

Heinz Lienhard graduated in electrical engineering at the Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich (

ETH Zurich (colloquially) , former_name = eidgenössische polytechnische Schule , image = ETHZ.JPG , image_size = , established = , type = Public , budget = CHF 1.896 billion (2021) , rector = Günther Dissertori , president = Joël Mesot , ac ...

) in 1961. He started his professional career at Contraves-Oerlikon, a Swiss weapons manufacturer. There, a digital computer had been developed. Lienhard joined this company to write programs for the computer, called CORA 1. Then, he moved to the US to work for

AMPEX Ampex is an American electronics company founded in 1944 by Alexander M. Poniatoff as a spin-off of Dalmo-Victor. The name AMPEX is a portmanteau, created by its founder, which stands for Alexander M. Poniatoff Excellence.AbramsoThe History ...

Redwood City, California Redwood City is a city on the San Francisco Peninsula in Northern California's Bay Area, approximately south of San Francisco, and northwest of San Jose. Redwood City's history spans its earliest inhabitation by the Ohlone people to being a ...

, where he did research on magnetic thin-film memories. Simultaneously, he studied statistics at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

, where he obtained a

Master of Science A Master of Science ( la, Magisterii Scientiae; abbreviated MS, M.S., MSc, M.Sc., SM, S.M., ScM or Sc.M.) is a master's degree in the field of science awarded by universities in many countries or a person holding such a degree. In contrast to ...

degree. After moving back to Switzerland, he joined

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, a Swiss company based in

Zug , neighboring_municipalities = Cham, Baar, Walchwil, Steinhausen, Unterägeri , twintowns = Fürstenfeld (Austria), Kalesija (Bosnia-Herzegowina) Zug (Standard German: , Alemannic German: ; french: Zoug it, Zugo r ...

. With his team at the central laboratories he developed metering equipment for electric utilities and debit cards for phone companies based on

holography Holography is a technique that enables a wavefront to be recorded and later re-constructed. Holography is best known as a method of generating real three-dimensional images, but it also has a wide range of other applications. In principle, i ...

, called ''Phonocards''. Starting in 1974, he conceived a new programming language based on

Pascal Pascal, Pascal's or PASCAL may refer to: People and fictional characters * Pascal (given name), including a list of people with the name * Pascal (surname), including a list of people and fictional characters with the name ** Blaise Pascal, Fren ...

. Together with his colleague Rudolf Schild, he optimized Pascal for real-time applications and multi-processor systems. Their resulting language was called ''Process-Oriented Real-Time Algorithmic Language'' (Portal). Together with the

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, an application for the Bobst Group was implemented.Heinz Lienhard et al.: ''Simulation and process-control with parallel processes as implemented in PORTAL.'' Proc. of the IMACS Conference 1979, Sorrento, Italy. In 1993, Lienhard founded the company ''Ivyteam AG'' in Zug. Ivyteam was specialized to model business processes.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Lienhard, Heinz 20th-century Swiss engineers ETH Zurich alumni 1937 births 2020 deaths