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by Randy CassinghamRandy Cassingham's Honorary Unsubscribe Recognizes the Unknown, the Forgotten and the Obscure People who Had an Impact on Our Lives
John Wilder Tukey
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A statistician and researcher for AT&T's Bell Labs, Tukey worked on how to analyze and display data. In the 1960s, he designed polls for NBC television's election coverage. But he's best known for his contributions to another field: computing. In 1958, he coined the term "software", noting the instructions that run computers are "at least as important" as the "'hardware' of tubes, transistors, wires, tapes and the like." In 1946, he coined the term "bit", a contraction of "binary" and "digit". Tukey died July 26 in New Jersey from a heart attack. He was 85.
From This is True for 23 July 2000
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