According to the advertisements of the time, the ideal 1950s American woman was a happy housewife living in a neat suburban home, smiling children and handsome, square-jawed husband by her side.
Nobody had yet heard of feminism and the glass ceiling was just a ceiling made of glass. Most girls seemed happy to wait for Prince Charming to sweep them off their feet.
Evelyn Berezin, who has died aged 93, was not like most girls. A scientist-turned-tech entrepreneur, she went on to design computers and is credited with building the first ever word processor.
Her idea was spot-on: women might not have had careers at the time, but some had jobs, mostly as secretaries. It was these women, estimated to be 6% of the US workforce, that Berezin had in mind when she created her word processor.
It was supposed to make a secretary’s job easier but in the end it made them redundant: “I didn’t see that coming at all,” she would confess years later.
Evelyn Berezin was the daughter of Sam and Rose (née Berman), Russian Jews whose families had been part of the wave of immigration from Russia to the US at the beginning of the 20th century. Neither Sam, a fur-cutter, nor Rose, a seamstress, had experienced much of a formal education: Sam had attended Cheder till the age of 13; Rose was taught to read and write in Yiddish, but that was all.
Evelyn, her two older brothers, parents and an uncle lived in the East Bronx, next to the elevated subway. Its constant roar provided the soundtrack to the evenings she spent reading science fiction in Astounding Stories magazine.
A brainy, precocious student who graduated from High School at 15, Berezin attended the all-girl Hunter College. The onset of war in December, 1941 opened doors that up to then had been firmly shut to women. Berezin got a job as a ‘tech’, a lab assistant, at the International Printing Company in Manhattan. The ‘techs’ were usually boys but now that they were needed by the Army, there was an opportunity for clever girls.
Berezin was only 16 but was very tall and wore makeup; she lied about her age and got the job. She worked during the day and went to college at night, studying maths at Brooklyn Poly (the only girl there) and physics and chemistry at New York University. She earned a degree in physics from NYU in 1946.
Things started to happen for her: she applied for, and received, an Atomic Energy Commission Fellowship for Graduate School and married Israel Wilenitz, a British-born Israeli she had met on a blind date.
Her plan was to make some money before moving with her husband to Israel. When told there were no jobs for physicists, she surprised herself by blurting out: “Are there any jobs in computers?”
Berezin had never worked in computers but somehow knew that the circuits she had designed for her experiments were similar to those used in computers. In a stroke of luck, a start-up computer company, Electronic Computer Corporation (Elecom), was looking for people.
Berezin was asked to design a circuit, which she promptly did, and was hired as a logic designer. She was put to work designing all types of machines, among them one for calculating gun ranges.
When Elecom went bankrupt in 1957 she quickly got a job with Teleregister where she designed a computer for banks, followed by a communications system for the American Stock Exchange. She also created the first passenger reservation system for United Airlines.
However, by the early 1960s she realised that, simply because she was a woman she would never scale the heights of any company. The only way up was to start her own. So, together with former colleagues,she did just that.
Berezin liked the idea of word processing as a business: with an estimated 12 million secretaries in the US at the time the potential market for a “very compact, very inexpensive” machine was huge.
When Intel proved too busy to build processor chips for Redactron, Berezin’s company, it was decided they would build some of them themselves as time was of the essence. Bigger – and richer – competitors were working on similar products.
The first Redactron ‘Data Secretary’ was delivered in September, 1971. It had a separate typewriter plus a small case on the side “with everything else in it”. It was bulky and noisy and had no monitor screen but could cut and paste without the need to retype.
Success was immediate but after a few years Redactron ran into financial difficulties. “We happened to start when the economy was due for a bad crash and we didn’t have enough money to build it into a real company”, Berezin would say years later. Redactron was acquired by the Burroughs Corporation but Berezin, who had remained as president of Redactron, found herself sidelined and after four years, quit in frustration.
She went on to join the boards of many big companies: “the women’s movement was riding high and companies were scrambling to get a woman on the Board”, she would say later.
She also became involved with the science-oriented Stone Brook University, which was near her house in Long Island. SBU was committed to new ideas and Berezin was happy to act as mentor, a role she enjoyed.
Although she was eventually inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame in 2011, her pioneering achievements were never fully recognised. She had simply been ahead of her time.
Evelyn Berezin was married for 51 years to Israel Wilenitz. He predeceased her. They had no children.
Julie Carbonara
Evelyn Berezin: born April 12, 1925. Died December 8, 2018
