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.

Life

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