Heinz Lienhard

Heinz Lienhard (18 June 1937 – 12 May 2020) was a Swiss electrical engineer and an inventor.[1] He was inventor of current measuring equipment[2] and developer of the programming language PORTAL.[3]

Life

Heinz Lienhard graduated in electrical engineering at the Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich (ETH Zurich) in 1961. He started his professional career at Contraves-Oerlikon, a Swiss weapons manufacturer. There, a digital computer had been developed. Lienhard joined this company to write programs for the computer, called CORA 1.[4] Then, he moved to the US to work for AMPEX in Redwood City, California, where he did research on magnetic thin-film memories. Simultaneously, he studied statistics at Stanford University, where he obtained a Master of Science degree. After moving back to Switzerland, he joined Landis+Gyr, a Swiss company based in Zug. With his team at the central laboratories he developed metering equipment for electric utilities and debit cards for phone companies based on holography, called Phonocards.[5]

Starting in 1974, he conceived a new programming language based on Pascal. Together with his colleague Rudolf Schild, he optimized Pascal for real-time applications and multi-processor systems. Their resulting language was called Process-Oriented Real-Time Algorithmic Language (Portal).[6] Together with the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, an application for the Bobst Group was implemented.[7]

In 1993, Lienhard founded the company Ivyteam AG in Zug. Ivyteam was specialized to model business processes.

References
  1. Heinz Lienhard-Manz. Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 20 May 2020, p. 6. Retrieved 5 July 2022.
  2. Inventor Heinz Lienhard. patents.justia.com. Retrieved 5 July 2022.
  3. Heinz Lienhard and Rudolf Schild: Echtzeitprogrammierung in PORTAL. ACM Sigplan Mitteilungen, Vol. 15, April 1980, Nr. 4, pp. 79 to 92.
  4. Lienhard, Heinz: Programmierung des Rechners Cora 1. Bulletin Contraves, 1965, 89 pages.
  5. Die optisch kodierte Karte: System- und Sicherheitsaspekte. LANDIS & GYR Mitteilungen, 1/1980, pp. 14-20.
  6. Heinz Lienhard: Die Echtzeit-Programmiersprache PORTAL, Einführung und Übersicht. LANDIS & GYR Mitteilungen, 2/1978, pp. 2-8.
  7. Heinz Lienhard et al.: Simulation and process-control with parallel processes as implemented in PORTAL. Proc. of the IMACS Conference 1979, Sorrento, Italy.
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