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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, graduating in 1945 or 1946 (sources differ), 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. By then she had been designing computers for nearly a decade.

Booking Every Seat

From 1951 Berezin headed logic design at Electronic Computer Corporation in Brooklyn, and from 1957 at Teleregister, a Western Union division, 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, served 60 cities across the United States from a central set of flight records and answered a query in about a second. It was 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 clerks in 60 cities 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. On 30 July 1969 she founded Redactron Corporation to build it, raised $1.25 million in venture capital from people she knew, and in December moved into a building in an industrial park on Long Island.

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 from General Instrument, Standard Microsystems and Redactron itself, 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. The first thousand machines were built within a year of the first delivery; prices ran from $6,400 to $8,200, or $176 to $278 a month to rent, and Sperry Rand resold a share under its own label. Redactron went public in 1972 and by the mid-1970s had about 500 employees and some $16 million in annual sales, but it made no profit. It sold some 10,000 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 January 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 until 1980 as president of its Redactron division, 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 was president of Greenhouse Management, general partner of a group of early-stage venture funds, sat on the boards of CIGNA, Koppers and Datapoint, and was a trustee of the Stony Brook Foundation. The honors came late and mostly quietly: the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame in 2011, Fellow of the Computer History Museum in 2015, 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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