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Evelyn Berezin

Abstract

Evelyn Berezin designed one of the first computerized airline reservation systems and then built the first standalone word processor, and for a while ran the company that made it, one of very few women running a computer firm in the early 1970s. Trained as a physicist because the physics jobs were the ones that would hire her, she spent the 1950s designing computers when the field barely had a name. Her Data Secretary, shipped by her own Redactron Corporation in 1971, let a typist edit and reprint a letter without retyping it, and helped create the office-word-processing industry that Wang and then the PC would take over. She sold the company in 1976 and spent decades on corporate boards, and was largely forgotten until, near the end of her life, people started asking why.

Physics, and the Door That Closed

Berezin was born in the Bronx on 12 April 1925 to Jewish immigrants from what is now Belarus. She studied physics at New York University, finishing in 1945, and held an Atomic Energy Commission fellowship for graduate work. Physics was not where her heart necessarily was; it was where a woman with her aptitude could actually get hired and funded in the 1940s, and it taught her the electronics she would use for the rest of her career.

The barriers were explicit. In 1960 the New York Stock Exchange offered her a senior job and then withdrew it when they realized she was a woman, on the reasoning that the role required dealing with men on the trading floor. She recalled being told, in effect, that the problem was not her ability but her sex. She stopped looking for other people’s companies to run and started designing systems.

Booking Every Seat

Through the 1950s Berezin designed computers at Electronic Computer Corporation and then at Teleregister, where she took on a problem that was enormous for the hardware of the day: letting airline clerks in many cities book seats on the same flights, in real time, without double-selling. Her Reservisor system for United Airlines, delivered around 1962, connected dozens of cities to a central set of flight records and answered a query in about a second. It was one of the largest computer installations of its time and an early example of what would later be called online transaction processing, a machine that many people hit at once and that had to stay correct and available.

The same problem was being solved in parallel by IBM and American Airlines with the better-known SABRE system. Berezin’s version has stayed obscure, but she had built, years before most people thought of computers as anything but calculators, a networked database that thousands of clerks used live.

The Data Secretary

Her next idea came from watching how offices actually ran. A secretary who made one mistake near the top of a page, or whose boss changed one sentence, had to type the whole page again. Berezin reasoned that a machine with a bit of memory could hold the text, let the typist fix it, and print a clean copy on command. In 1969 she founded Redactron Corporation to build it.

The Data Secretary shipped in September 1971. It had no screen. It used an IBM Selectric typewriter mechanism for input and output, stored text on cassette tapes, and ran on 13 semiconductor chips of custom logic that Berezin designed, at a time when packing that much function into a standalone desk unit was hard. A typist could enter a letter, correct it, store it, and print it as many times as needed, each copy perfect. Redactron sold the machine for around $8,000 and competed directly with IBM’s Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter, the MT/ST, which had opened the category in the mid-1960s but was tied to IBM’s larger apparatus.

The machine did a narrow thing, but it named an industry. “Word processing” became a category of office equipment, then the dominant use of the dedicated machines that Wang built into a business in 1976 (see Dead End: Wang Labs), and finally a $300 program on a general-purpose PC that erased the specialized hardware entirely. Berezin was at the front of that chain.

Running the Company

Building the word processor made Berezin something rarer than an inventor: a woman who was the president of a computer company she had founded, hiring, raising money, and running a factory. Redactron grew to several hundred employees and shipped thousands of machines. She ran it for seven years.

Then the economics turned. The recession and high interest rates of the mid-1970s made it hard for a hardware company to fund its growth, and in 1976 Berezin sold Redactron to Burroughs, which continued the product line as the Redactron II and III, sold both on their own and as terminals for its mainframes. Berezin stayed at Burroughs for a few years, then left corporate management for the other side of the table.

Why Isn’t She Famous?

For the rest of her career Berezin sat on boards and worked in venture capital, backing and governing technology companies rather than founding them. She served as a director of several firms and advised Stony Brook University. The honors came late and mostly quietly: the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame in 2011, and induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2020, after her death.

A British writer, Gwyn Headley, struck by her story, published a short piece with the title “Why is this woman not famous?” It circulated, and in the last years of her life Berezin got some of the attention her contemporaries had had for decades. She was clear-eyed about the machine she had made. Word processing freed typists from the drudgery of retyping, and it also, over the following decades, helped shrink the very pool of secretarial jobs that had been one of the few professional footholds open to women, the same women who had been the reason her own path ran through physics. She died on 8 December 2018, at 93. Her work sits under a large part of modern office computing; her name, until recently, did not (see Women in Computing).

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