Informatics General: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 21:36, 15 August 2024

Revision as of 06:11, 23 November 2024

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The company's name came from the founders' desire to base it on "-atics", a Greek suffix meaning "the science of".<ref name="bauer-et">Bauer, "Informatics and (et) Informatique".</ref> Their first thought was "Datamatics", but a form of that was already taken by an early computer from [[Honeywell]]/[[Raytheon]]; Bauer and the others settled on "Informatics", meaning "the science of information handling".<ref name="bauer-et"/><ref name="frank-oh-39-40"/>

At the very same time, March 1962, French computer pioneer [[Philippe Dreyfus]] came up with the name "Société pour l'informatique appliquée" for a new firm of which he was co-founder, thus creating a French version of the same name.<ref name="bauer-et"/> However, in France, the term "[[w:frwiktionary:Informatiqueinformatique#French|informatique]]" soon became a generic name, meaning the modern science of information handling, and would become accepted by the [[Académie française]] as an official French word.<ref name="bauer-et"/> The term then came into common use in a number of other European countries, adapted slightly for each language.<ref name="frank-oh-39-40"/>

In the United States, however, Informatics fought any such use as an infringement upon their legal rights to the name; this was partly in fear of the term becoming a [[brandnomer]].<ref name="bauer-et"/> Bauer later recalled that at one point the [[Association for Computing Machinery]], the leading academic organization in computer software, wanted to change its name to the Society for Informatics, but the company refused to allow that use.<ref name="bauer-et"/> Eventually the generic usage of the term around the world caused the company to reconsider and, according to Frank, was the reason for the 1982 name change to Informatics General.<ref name="frank-oh-39-40"/>