Werner Buchholz (24 October 1922 – 11 July 2019) was a German-American computer scientist. After growing up in Europe, Buchholz moved to Canada and then to the United States. He worked for International Business Machines (IBM) in New York. In June 1956, he coined the term "

byte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable uni ...

" for a unit of digital information. In 1990, he was recognized as a computer pioneer by the

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operation ...

Biography

Early life

Werner Buchholz was born on 24 October 1922 in Detmold, Germany. His older brother, Carl Hellmut and he were the sons of the merchant and his wife, . Due to the growing

anti-semitism Antisemitism (also spelled anti-semitism or anti-Semitism) is hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against Jews. A person who holds such positions is called an antisemite. Antisemitism is considered to be a form of racism. Antis ...

in Detmold in 1936, the family moved to Cologne. Werner was able to go to England in 1938 where he attended school, while Carl Hellmut emigrated to America. Because of the threat of invasion in May 1940, Werner with other refugee students was interned by the British and later sent to Canada. With the help of the Jewish community in Toronto, he was released in 1941 and able to attend the University of Toronto. He completed his training as an

electrical engineer Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

in the United States at

Caltech The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech or CIT)The university itself only spells its short form as "Caltech"; the institution considers other spellings such a"Cal Tech" and "CalTech" incorrect. The institute is also occasional ...

. His parents were murdered in 1942 (Julius) and 1944 (Elsa) in a concentration camp in Litzmannstadt (

Łódź Łódź, also rendered in English as Lodz, is a city in central Poland and a former industrial centre. It is the capital of Łódź Voivodeship, and is located approximately south-west of Warsaw. The city's coat of arms is an example of ca ...

Career

Werner Buchholz was a member of the team at IBM that designed the

IBM 701 The IBM 701 Electronic Data Processing Machine, known as the Defense Calculator while in development, was IBM’s first commercial scientific computer and its first series production mainframe computer, which was announced to the public on May ...

and the

IBM 7030 Stretch The IBM 7030, also known as Stretch, was IBM's first transistorized supercomputer. It was the fastest computer in the world from 1961 until the first CDC 6600 became operational in 1964."Designed by Seymour Cray, the CDC 6600 was almost three t ...

, IBM's first transistorized supercomputer. His work involved setting standards in the field of

character Character or Characters may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Literature * ''Character'' (novel), a 1936 Dutch novel by Ferdinand Bordewijk * ''Characters'' (Theophrastus), a classical Greek set of character sketches attributed to The ...

encoding on computing systems. In 1956, he coined the term ''

'' as a unit of digital information. A byte was an ordered collection of bits, which were the smallest amounts of data that a computer could process ("

bite Biting is a common zoological behavior involving the active, rapid closing of the jaw around an object. This behavior is found in toothed animals such as mammals, reptiles, amphibians and fish, but can also exist in arthropods. Myocytic co ...

"). In 1990, Buchholz received the

IEEE Computer Pioneer Award The Computer Pioneer Award was established in 1981 by the Board of Governors of the IEEE Computer Society to recognize and honor the vision of those people whose efforts resulted in the creation and continued vitality of the computer industry. T ...

, awarded since 1981 to recognize and honor individuals whose effort resulted in the creation and vitality of the computer industry.

Personal life

He worked 40 years at IBM in

Poughkeepsie, New York Poughkeepsie ( ), officially the City of Poughkeepsie, separate from the Town of Poughkeepsie around it) is a city in the U.S. state of New York. It is the county seat of Dutchess County, with a 2020 census population of 31,577. Poughkeeps ...

, where he participated in the development of the computer. His wife Anna died in 2007 and their son John in 1975. Buchholz died in July 2019 at the age of 96.Werner Buchholz obituary
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Notes

References