Werner Buchholz of IBM

The term byte
The term byte was coined by Werner Buchholz in July 1956, during the early design phase for the IBM Stretch computer, which had addressing to the bit and variable field length (VFL) instructions with a byte size encoded in the instruction. It is a deliberate respelling of bite to avoid accidental mutation to bit.

Werner Buchholz (born 1922 in Detmold, Germany) is a noted IBM computer scientist. He worked for International Business Machines (IBM) in New York. In July 1956, he coined the term byte for a unit of digital information. In 1990, he was recognized as a computer pioneer by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.