In 1956, the German informatician
Karl Steinbuch and engineer
Helmut Gröttrup coined the word
Informatik when they developed the
Informatik-Anlage for the
Quelle mail-order management, one of the earliest commercial applications of data processing. In April 1957, Steinbuch published a paper called
Informatik: Automatische Informationsverarbeitung ("Informatics: Automatic Information Processing"). The morphology—
informat-ion + -
ics—uses "the accepted form for names of sciences, as conics, mathematics, linguistics, optics, or matters of practice, as economics, politics, tactics", and so, linguistically, the meaning extends easily to encompass both the science of information and the practice of information processing. The German word
Informatik is usually translated to English as
computer science by universities or
computer science & engineering by technical universities (German equivalents for institutes of technology). Depending on the context, informatics is also translated into
computing,
scientific computing or
information and computer technology. The
French term
informatique was coined in 1962 by
Philippe Dreyfus. In the same month was also proposed independently by Walter F. Bauer (1924–2015) and associates who co-founded software company
Informatics Inc. The term for the new discipline quickly spread throughout Europe, but it did not catch on in the United States. Over the years, many different definitions of informatics have been developed, most of them claim that the essence of informatics is one of these concepts: information processing, algorithms, computation, information, algorithmic processes, computational processes or computational systems. Early practitioners interested in the field soon learned that there were no formal education programs, and none emerged until the late 1960s. They introduced the term informatics only in the context of
archival science, which is only a small part of informatics. Professional development, therefore, played a significant role in the development of health informatics. The term
health informatics quickly spread throughout the United States in various forms such as
nursing informatics,
public health informatics or
medical informatics. Analogous terms were later introduced for use of computers in various fields, such as
business informatics,
forest informatics,
legal informatics etc. These fields still mainly use term informatics in context of library science. == Informatics as information processing science ==