The term and foundational concept of the "byte"—defining a unit of digital information storage comprising a group of binary bits—was coined and pioneered by computer scientist Werner Buchholz in July 1956. Working at IBM during the early development stages of the stretch computer project, Buchholz designed the byte to be a flexible collection of bits large enough to encode a single character of text. Originally conceptualized as varying in size before standardizing around an 8-bit architecture, his fundamental definition became the cornerstone of modern digital computing and data memory measurement.