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by Walter F. Bauer
Copyright © 1996 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, All Rights
Reserved. This material is posted here with permission of the IEEE, from IEEE Annals of
the History of Computing, Vol. 18, No. 2, 1996.
The name Informatics has some historical significance. My colleagues
and I spent some time deciding on the name for the new company. We were attracted to the
suffix "-atics," the Greek ending which suggests "the science of." We
tried Datamatics but the name was reserved and there was a computer called the Datamatic
1000, developed in a joint venture of Raytheon and Honeywell corporations.
"Informatics" was the next thought, suggesting the "science of information
handling. We thought the name was great for the industry. So proud, in fact, that within
the company there was later friendly competition, never resolved, as to who should get
credit for having invented the name.
Interesting things later happened. In France, a group started a
software company called Societe pour L’Informatique et Applique (SIA). Phillipe
Dreyfus, a French system/software pioneer, was a principal founder. In so doing this group
invented the French version of the name. In France the name took on the meaning,
generically, of "the modern science of electronic information processing." It
was accepted a few years later as an official French word, gaining acceptance by
L’Academie francaise, something not easy to do. The word Informatique has now been
adopted and adapted in Europe in various formats: Informatik, Informatica, etc.
In the United States quite the opposite happened. The word belonged
to Informatics legally through adoption and usage; through the years we stopped many
organizations from using the name on the advice of our patent attorneys. (This is on the
theory that names like Xerox and Cellophane came into general use to the detriment of
their respective companies because they were not protected.) In fact, at one point the
Association for Computing Machinery officially applied to us for permission to use the
name. They wished to change ACM to Society for Informatics. We were flattered, but, after
consultation with our attorneys, declined; the name was an asset which belonged to our
shareholders and we could not dilute its value.
Some three or four years after SIA and Informatics were formed, I
met Phillipe Dreyfus in Paris for dinner. We discussed the invention of the name(s). We
were both amazed to learn that we each developed the name in the same month of the same
year, March 1962.
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