Retrobytetech-historyibmstretchsystem-360
IBM's Werner Buchholz Coined "Byte" in a 1956 Memo, When a Byte Could Be One to Six Bits
Werner Buchholz told BYTE magazine in 1977 that he coined the word during IBM's Stretch project in June 1956, spelled it with a y so it couldn't decay into "bit," and that eight bits came later.
In late 1976, a Cornell project manager named Thomas P. Bishop wrote to BYTE magazine for help. He had spent “the past few years” trying to find where the word “byte” came from, and he was starting to think “the origin is lost.”
The man who made it up read about the letter secondhand and wrote in.
Buchholz heard about Bishop’s question “from a colleague who knew that I had perpetrated this piece of jargon. I searched my files and could not locate a birth certificate.”
He found the next best thing. “The first reference found in the files was contained in an internal memo written in June 1956 during the early days of developing Stretch. A “byte” was described as consisting of any number of parallel bits from one to six. Thus, a “byte” was assumed to have a length appropriate for the occasion.”
Six was the ceiling because of the hardware around it. “Its first use was in the context of the input-output equipment of the 1950s, which handled six bits at a time,” he wrote. “The possibility of going to 8 bit “bytes” was considered in August 1956, and incorporated in the design of Stretch shortly thereafter.”
The spelling was on purpose. Buchholz quoted the 1962 book on Stretch that he edited, which explained it on page 40: “(The term is coined from “bite”, but respelled to avoid accidental mutation to “bit”.)” One dropped letter in a memo or a manual, and the two words would have collided.
The word “byte” came from someone trying to name a variable-length thing, and the eight-bit meaning is what one product decision froze into it. Expect the same to happen to today’s loose terms. “Token” already means different sizes in different AI models, and the meaning most likely gets fixed the same way: when one dominant platform picks a size for economy and everyone else matches it to stay compatible.
There is a rival claim. Another account, credited to a Lincoln Laboratory engineer named Dooley, places the word on the SAGE air-defense project in 1956 or 1957. Its original text isn’t online, and Buchholz’s June 1956 memo is the earliest dated record.
Buchholz ended his letter with a question for BYTE’s readers: “Are there any other terms coined especially for the computer field which have found their way into general dictionaries of the English language?” He quoted the 1962 book in full. The wording of the 1956 memo itself isn’t in the letter.