On this day in 1922 American computer scientist Werner Buchholz was born. Buchholz was born in Detmold, Germany, grew up in Europe and moved to Canada before finally moving to America. It was here that he worked for IBM in New York, and became part of the team that designed the IBM 701 and IBM 7030 Stretch supercomputers. Buchholz coined the term “byte”, a unit of digital information that referred to an ordered collection of bits, which was the smallest amount of data a computer could process.
In 1990 Buchholz received the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) Computer Pioneer Award, for his contributions to the development of the computer industry.