Evelyn Berezin: The Woman Who Invented the Computerized Word Processor

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In the late 1960s, a single slipped finger on page 49 of a legal brief meant pulling the paper out of the typewriter and starting the page again. Evelyn Berezin ended that. Born in the East Bronx in 1925 to Belarusian Jewish immigrants, a furrier and a seamstress, she grew up reading her brother's copies of Astounding Science Fiction, enrolled at Hunter College at 16, and studied physics while working full time in the rheology department of a printing ink company.

This episode follows her path from a physics career blocked by discrimination to a 1951 job as head of logic design at a Brooklyn startup, Electronic Computer Corporation, despite having no computer design experience. She went on to design a nationwide reservation system for United Airlines, lost a job offer from the New York Stock Exchange because of her sex, and in 1968 invented the Data Secretary. A year later she founded Redactron Corporation to build and sell it herself, in direct competition with IBM.

• At Teleregister in 1957, Berezin designed the Reservisor for United Airlines, a transistor-based network that answered queries from distant terminals in one second.
• The New York Stock Exchange offered her a role managing its computer operations in 1960, then withdrew it, saying the language on the trading floor was too rough for a woman.
• The Data Secretary was the size of a small refrigerator, had no screen, and used a modified IBM Selectric typewriter as its keyboard.
• Keystrokes were recorded on magnetic tape, so a secretary could rewind to an error, type over it, and have the machine print a clean copy at high speed.
• Berezin held nine patents and died in December 2018 at age 93. She was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2020.