Efraim R. "Efi" Arazi (; 14 April 1937 – 14 April 2013) was an Israeli technology pioneer and businessman.

Education

Arazi enrolled as a cadet to study electronics in the

Israel Defense Forces The Israel Defense Forces (IDF; , ), alternatively referred to by the Hebrew-language acronym (), is the national military of the State of Israel. It consists of three service branches: the Israeli Ground Forces, the Israeli Air Force, and ...

at the Air Force Technological Academy,If we always follow the hard-and-fast rules without any deviation or creativity, we shall certainly miss extraordinary talents and unusual people, and merely get a great deal of boring mediocrity
/ref> He earned an engineering degree in the 1960s at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

. (he was accepted to MIT via the "extraordinary cases" as he did not have a matriculation certificate).

Business career

Arazi began his career in the United States. He returned to Israel in June 1967. In 1968 he founded and headed Scitex Corporation (renamed Scailex Corporation in 2005), an Israel-based multi-national company that specialized in developing and manufacturing hardware and software for the graphics design, printing, and publishing markets. It was the first Israeli high-tech firm, and at its peak employed 4,000 people. Arazi stepped down as CEO and president of Scitex on 1 June 1988, but continued to serve as chairman of the board of directors of the company (a position to which he had been appointed on 1 May 1985) until 18 January 1989, when

Robert Maxwell Ian Robert Maxwell (born Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch; 10 June 1923 – 5 November 1991) was a Czechoslovakia, Czechoslovak-born British media proprietor, politician and fraudster. After escaping the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, ...

Mirror Group Reach plc (known as Trinity Mirror between 1999 and 2018) is a British newspaper, magazine and internet journalism, digital publisher. It is one of the UK's biggest newspaper groups, publishing 240 regional papers in addition to the national ' ...

acquired a 27% stake in the company and Maxwell was appointed chairman. In 1988 Arazi founded EFI -

Electronics for Imaging Electronics for Imaging, Inc. (EFI) is an international company based in Silicon Valley that specializes in digital printing technology. Formerly located in Foster City, California, the company is now based in Fremont. On July 1, 2015, EFI ente ...

. He later became CEO of iMedia, a developer of tools for cable, satellite, and

terrestrial television Terrestrial television, or over-the-air television (OTA) is a type of television broadcasting in which the content is signal transmission, transmitted via radio waves from the terrestrial (Earth-based) transmitter of a TV station to a TV rece ...

operators to manage compressed

digital video Digital video is an electronic representation of moving visual images (video) in the form of encoded digital data. This is in contrast to analog video, which represents moving visual images in the form of analog signals. Digital video comprises ...

. At the time of his death, Arazi was chairman of Seerun Ltd.

The term "computer art"

On the title page of the magazine Computers and Automation, January 1963,

Edmund Berkeley Edmund Callis Berkeley (March 21, 1909 – March 7, 1988) was an American computer scientist who co-founded the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in 1947. His 1949 book ''Giant Brains, or Machines That Think'' popularized cognitive i ...

published a picture by Efraim Arazi from 1962, coining for it the term "computer art." This picture inspired him to initiate the first Computer Art Contest in 1963. The annual contest was a key point in the development of computer art up to the year 1973.Herbert W. Franke: ''Grenzgebiete der bildenden Kunst,

Staatsgalerie Stuttgart The Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (, "State Gallery") is an art museum in Stuttgart, Germany, it opened in 1843. In 1984, the opening of the Neue Staatsgalerie (''New State Gallery'') designed by James Stirling transformed the once provincial galler ...

'' In: ''Katalog'', 1972, S. 69.

The Efi Arazi School of Computer Science

The Efi Arazi School of Computer Science is part o
IDC (Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya)
Israel's first private university. The school was founded in 1996, and named after Efi Arazi in 2003.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Arazi, Efi Israeli chief executives MIT School of Engineering alumni 1937 births 2013 deaths Place of birth missing