Lonely furrow as woman in early computer design
Evelyn Berezin computer designer b April 12, 1925 d December 8, 2018
Evelyn Berezin, who has died aged 93, was a computer designer and businesswoman who created the first computerised word processor. The Data Secretary, a typewriter with word-processing capability, consisted of a unit about a metre high with an IBM Selectric typewriter as the keyboard. The unit contained 13 semiconductor chips, some of which were designed by Berezin herself.
Beyond secretaries, the business world – particularly technology – was a lonely place for a woman in the 1950s and 1960s, and even in 1976, when she had been working for a quarter of a century, she was the United States’ only head of a tech company.
She was born in the Bronx, New York, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants. Her father, Sam, was a furrier, her mother, Rose, a seamstress.
A lover of science fiction from an early age, Evelyn graduated in physics from New York University. Although she began working on a doctorate there, funded by a fellowship from the US Atomic Energy Commission, in 1951 she joined the Electronic Computer Corporation, the company’s only woman.
‘‘They said to me, ‘Design a computer’,’’ she recalled. ‘‘I had never seen one before. Hardly anyone else had. So I just had to figure out how to do it. It was a lot of fun – when I wasn’t terrified.’’
An early machine she devised was a computer for the US Defense Department to assist in artillery aiming.
In 1959 she joined a company called Teleregister, for whom she designed several computers, including machines to manage company accounts, to enable computerised banking, to monitor how much money was spent on each horse at racecourses, and built the first automated airline reservations system for United Airlines, which had a one-second response time and operated for 11 years without any systems failures.
In 1968 she began working on her word processor, and the next year, with two male colleagues and $750,000 backing, she founded Redactron to sell the Data Secretary. The first advertisement, in Ms magazine, declared ‘‘the death of the deadend secretary’’.
There were a few early problems, she recalled. When a prototype was put on display for the press in a New York hotel, the weather was dry and there was a build-up of static electricity in the machine.
‘‘To our horror it was a dry day and the engineers were setting this non-working machine up for our big story. Ed Wolf, our head of engineering, brought a full pail of water and without a word to anyone throws the pail of water over the whole thick carpet in the room. The water sank into the carpet, which stayed damp for three or four hours, and the machine worked perfectly.’’
Later versions of Redactron word processors came with monitor screens, printers, more memory, smaller consoles and faster processing speeds. About 10,000 machines were sold for $8000 each before the company ran into financial problems thanks to rising interest rates, and in 1976 Berezin sold up to the Burroughs corporation, continuing as president of its new Redactron division until 1980.
It was not a happy marriage, however. ‘‘I was not one of them,’’ she recalled. ‘‘I told them what I thought – a loud woman they did not know how to deal with. So they disconnected and so did I.’’
From then until 1987 she was president of Greenhouse Management, a venture capital company that invested in technology start-ups, and worked as a consultant.
She married Israel Wilenitz, a chemical engineer from London, in 1951. He died in 2003; they had no children. –