Werner Buchholz (engineer)

Werner Buchholz (born October 24, 1922 in Detmold ; † July 11, 2019 ) was a German-American engineer . He worked for IBM for a long time and became known as the creator of the word byte .

Life

Buchholz was born in Detmold as the son of the Jewish businessman Julius Buchholz and his wife Elsa (both later murdered by the Nazis) . Due to increasing anti-Semitism , he emigrated to England in 1938 , where he attended school, where he was interned after the start of the war and sent to Canada in 1940 . In 1941 he was released from internment and was able to attend the University of Toronto .

He then worked as a hardware architect for IBM on the IBM 701 and 7030 mainframe computers . In 1956 he created the word "Byte". He and Fred Brooks were the first to use the word in a publication in 1959.

In 1990 he received the Computer Pioneer Award .

swell

1. ↑ Werner Buchholz 1922 - 2019 In: legacy.com. Poughkeepsie Journal, July 17, 2019, accessed October 25, 2019.
2. ^ Wolfgang Lassmann, Jens Schwarzer: Wirtschaftsinformatik . Gabler Verlag, 2006, ISBN 3-409-12725-9 . P. 562
3. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of the original from April 2, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
4. ^ Edwin D. Reilly: Milestones in Computer Science and Information Technology . Greenwood Publishing Group, 2003, ISBN 1-57356-521-0 . P. 37