Biography

Werner Buchholz (born 24 October 1922 in Detmold, Germany) is a noted American computer scientist. In July 1956, he coined the term byte, a unit of digital information to describe an ordered group of bits, as the smallest amount of data that a computer could process (bite).

As a member of the team at International Business Machines (IBM) that designed the IBM 701 and the IBM 7030 Stretch, IBM’s first transistorized supercomputer, his work was standards-setting in the field of character encoding on computing systems.