#Redactron

[xtruss]

Evelyn Berezin in 1976 at the Long Island office of her company Redactron. She developed one of the earliest word processors and helped usher in a technological revolution. Evelyn Berezin said her word processor would help secretaries become more efficient at their jobs. Photo By Barton Silverman/New York Times.

Evelyn Berezin, “Godmother of the Word Processor!” The Woman That Made Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Possible

Evelyn Berezin (1925-2018) was born in the Bronx to poor Russian-Jewish immigrants. Growing up, she loved reading science fiction and wished to study physics. She excelled at school and graduated two years early. Berezin had to wear make-up and fake her age to get a job at a research lab. She ended up studying economics because it was a more “fitting” subject for women at the time. During World War II, she finally received a scholarship to study physics at New York University. Berezin studied at night, while working full time at the International Printing Company during the day. She continued doing graduate work at New York University, with a fellowship from the US Atomic Energy Commission. In 1951, she joined the Electronic Computer Corporation, designing some of the world’s very first computers. At the time, computers were massive machines that could only do several specific functions.

Evelyn Berezin, “Godmother of the Word Processor.” Born: April 12, 1925, The Bronx, New York City, NY — Died: December 8, 2018, ArchCare at Mary Manning Walsh Nursing Home & Rehabilitation Center, New York, NY

Berezin headed the Logic Design Department, and came up with a computer to manage the distribution of magazines, and to calculate firing distances for US Army artillery. In 1957, Berezin transferred to work at Teleregister, where she designed the first banking computer and the first computerized airline reservation system (linking computers in 60 cities, and never failing once in the 11 years that it ran). Her most famous feat was in 1968 when she created the world’s first personal word processor to ease the plight of secretaries (then making up 6% of the workforce).

“Without Ms. Berezin There Would Be No Bill Gates, No Steve Jobs, No Internet, No Word Processors, No Spreadsheets; Nothing That Remotely Connects Business With The 21st Century.” — The Times of Israel (12 December 2018)

The following year, she founded her own company, Redactron Corporation, and built a mini-fridge-sized word processor, the “Data Secretary”, with a keyboard and printer, cassette tapes for memory storage, and no screen. With the ability to go back and edit text, cut and paste, and print multiple copies at once, Berezin’s computer freed the world “from the shackles of the typewriter”. The machine was an in instant hit, selling thousands of units around the world. Berezin’s word processor not only set the stage for future word processing software, like Microsoft Word, but for compact personal computers in general. It is credited with being the world’s first office computer. Not surprisingly, it has been said that without Evelyn Berezin “there would have been no Bill Gates, and no Steve Jobs”.

Evelyn Berezin Pioneered Word Processors and Butted Heads With Men! A ‘loud woman,’ she studied physics and found that to get to the top she had to start her own company. Evelyn Berezin later became a mentor to entrepreneurs, venture capitalist and director of companies. Photo: Berezin Family. Wall Street Journal

“Why Is This Woman Not Famous?” British Writer Gwyn Headley Wrote In A 2010 Blog Post. — The Times of Israel

Redactron grew to a public company with over 500 employees. As president, she was the only woman heading a corporation in the US at the time, and was described as the “Most Senior Businesswoman in the United States”. Redactron was eventually bought out by Burroughs Corporation, where Berezin worked for several more years. In 1980, she moved on to head a venture capital group investing in new technologies. Berezin served on the boards of a number of organizations, including Stony Brook University and the Brookhaven National Laboratory, and was a sought-after consultant for the world’s biggest tech companies.

She was a key part of the American Women’s Economic Development Corporation for 25 years, training thousands of women in how to start businesses of their own, with a success rate of over 60%. In honour of her parents, she established the Sam and Rose Berezin Endowed Scholarship, paying tuition in full for an undergraduate science student each year. Sadly, Berezin passed away earlier this month. She left her estate to fund a new professorship or research centre at Stony Brook University. Berezin won multiple awards and honourary degrees, and was inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame.

[newstfionline]

Evelyn Berezin, 93, Dies; Built the First True Word Processor

By Robert D. McFadden, NY Times, Dec. 10, 2018

Evelyn Berezin, a computer pioneer who emancipated many a frazzled secretary from the shackles of the typewriter nearly a half-century ago by building and marketing the first computerized word processor, died on Saturday in Manhattan. She was 93.

In an age when computers were in their infancy and few women were involved in their development, Ms. Berezin (pronounced BEAR-a-zen) not only designed the first true word processor; in 1969, she was also a founder and the president of the Redactron Corporation, a tech start-up on Long Island that was the first company exclusively engaged in manufacturing and selling the revolutionary machines.

To secretaries, who constituted 6 percent of the American work force then, Redactron word processors arrived in an office like a trunk of magic tricks, liberating users from the tyranny of having to retype pages marred by bad keystrokes and the monotony of copying pages for wider distribution. The machines were bulky, slow and noisy, but they could edit, delete, and cut and paste text.

Modern word processors, which appear as programs on computers, long ago simplified the tasks of authors, journalists and other writers--sometimes after misgivings over the risk of surrendering to a future of dystopian technology--but became so efficient in offices that they killed off the need for most of the old-fashioned secretarial skills Ms. Berezin was trying to enhance.

“I’m embarrassed to tell you that I never thought of it--it never entered my mind” that the word processor might endanger women’s jobs, Ms. Berezin said in an interview for this obituary in 2017.

Ms. Berezin called her computer the Data Secretary. It was 40 inches high, the size of a small refrigerator, and had no screen for words to trickle across. Its keyboard and printer was an I.B.M. Selectric Typewriter with a rattling print head the size of a golf ball. The device had 13 semiconductor chips, some of which Ms. Berezin designed, and programmable logic to drive its word-processing functions.

Later versions of Redactron word processors came with monitor screens for text, separate printers, greater memory caches, smaller consoles, faster processing speeds and more programmed features to smooth the writing and editing tasks.

With law firms and corporate offices as its main clients, Redactron sold some 10,000 machines for $8,000 each before running into financial problems after seven years of independent operation. The company was sold in 1976 to the Burroughs Corporation, and Ms. Berezin joined the parent company as president of its Redactron division, a post she held until 1980. She then went on to careers in venture capital and consulting.

Even in her Redactron heyday, Ms. Berezin was hardly alone in the word processing business. Her chief competitor, International Business Machines, made devices that relied on electronic relays and tapes, not semiconductor chips. I.B.M. soon caught up technologically and swamped the market in the 1970s and ‘80s, pursued by a herd of brands like Osborne, Wang, Tandy and Kaypro.

But for a few years after Redactron started shipping its computerized word processors in September 1971, Ms. Berezin was a lioness of the young tech industry, featured in magazine and news articles as an adventurous do-it-herself polymath with the logical mind of an engineer, the curiosity of an inventor and the entrepreneurial skills of a C.E.O.

“Why is this woman not famous?” the British writer and entrepreneur Gwyn Headley asked in a 2010 blog post.

“Without Ms. Berezin,” he added enthusiastically, “there would be no Bill Gates, no Steve Jobs, no internet, no word processors, no spreadsheets; nothing that remotely connects business with the 21st century.”

Although Ms. Berezin was inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame in Los Angeles in 2011, Matthew G. Kirschenbaum noted in “Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing” (2016), “she remains a relatively unknown and underappreciated figure, with nowhere near the stature of other women who played significant roles in computer science and the computer industry and have since been recognized by historians.”

[mudwerks]

Computing pioneer Evelyn Berezin died at 93 this week. She was most known as the designer of the first true word-processing computer. But she designed many other innovative computing systems and helmed Redactron Corporation, a company that helped transform offices by producing and distributing her word-processor device...  

[aneddoticamagazinestuff]

What is Word Processing?

New Post has been published on https://www.aneddoticamagazine.com/what-is-word-processing/

What is Word Processing?

An original 1975 film describing WORD PROCESSING and showing many early word processing computers. This restored educational film explains the benefits of word processing, shows the IBM Selectric Typewriter, the (Rare) ICS Astrotype word processing system (with LINC type drives), IBM Selectric Composer, IBM Mag Card II, IBM MT/ST tape reels, a rare REDACTRON System cassette, LEXITRON and others. – Nice vintage look and feel & good overview. Rescued from an old 16mm film. Provided for historical & editorial comment only. Comments are welcome. ~ Hope you enjoy this vintage classic. Uploaded by Mark Greenia, at Computer History Archives Project

[m-o-p-e]

Evelyn Berezin called the device the Data Secretary when, in 1971, her company Redactron launched the product.

She grew Redactron from nine employees to close to 500 and was named one of the US's top leaders by BusinessWeek magazine in the year she sold it, 1976.

She had earlier built one of the original computerised airline reservation systems.

The innovation - which matched customers and available seats - was tested by United Airlines in 1962.

According to the Computer History Museum, it had a one-second response time and worked for 11 years without any central system failures.

The technology vied with the rival Sabre system, developed by American Airlines, for being the first of its kind.

In addition, Ms Berezin helped pioneer other types of special-purpose computing including:

an automated banking system

a weapons-targeting calculator for the US Defense Department

terminals for a horse-racing track that monitored how much money was being bet on each animal

Via Feminist News.

Evelyn Berezin built the first word processor.

[trackchangesbook]

Eveyln Berezin, who I interviewed and whose story I tell in Track Changes, has passed. She was a remarkable woman with a remarkable career. Above is her New York Times obituary.

As I note in the introduction to Track, firsts are always tricky. A headline that claims the “first true word processor” is especially so. Here, in shorthand style, are a few contextual points:

When it debuted in 1971, the Redactron Data Secretary was modeled on the IBM MT/ST, which had launched some seven years earlier, in 1964. IBM was also by then using the term “word processor” in its marketing. The Data Secretary improved on the IBM product in a number of ways---it was smaller, quieter, arguably more reliable---but the fundamentals were the same. Neither had a screen. Both used a Selectric typewriter as input and output device. Both stored character data on magnetic tape. The most significant difference was that the Data Secretary was one of the first products in the commercial market to make use of the new technology of integrated circuits, thus making it something closer to a programmable general purpose computer.

Other competitor products were also quickly coming into the marketplace at about the same time, notably the Lexitron, which did have a screen.

The line between “word processors” (which was more of a marketing term than anything else) and text editors has always been fuzzy. Text editors (and their kin, line editors) were used by programmers on early mainframe systems to write and correct code while it was still loaded into the system’s main memory. One did this by typing and revising text, first on a teletype and then on a screen with a keyboard. Such systems were in use by the late 1960s, and were arguably word processors in most respects. In 1972-3, the writer John Hersey would use a text editor to revise his novel My Petition for More Space and lay out camera ready copy for its publisher.

None of this is to detract from Evelyn Berezin’s accomplishment. She was a gifted programmer, engineer, and entrepreneur, and the Data Secretary was a successful product. But hopefully it adds a little more nuance to the labels of “first” and “true.”

[haircuts]

thanks to @redactron for this one!

[techbotic]

Computing pioneer Evelyn Berezin died this week—she should be remembered

Enlarge / Secretaries use typewriters, before the word processor changed everything. (credit: Evening Standard | Getty Images)

Computing pioneer Evelyn Berezin died at 93 this week. She was most known as the designer of the first true word-processing computer. But she designed many other innovative computing systems and helmed Redactron Corporation, a company that helped transform offices by producing and distributing her word-processor device.

Born to Jewish immigrants from Russia in New York City in 1925, Berezin earned a BA in physics at NYU before working throughout the 1950s and 1960s designing early computing systems. She had become interested in physics after reading her brother's science-fiction periodicals.

In the earlier years of her career, she worked amidst a wave of innovation and new possibilities that came with the arrival of transistors. Among her early accomplishments was an airline reservations system for United Airlines, which "served 60 cities throughout the United States with a one-second response time and with no central system failures in 11 years of operation," according to the Computer History Museum.

Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Computing pioneer Evelyn Berezin died this week—she should be remembered published first on https://medium.com/@CPUCHamp

[ready-jet-go]

Slashdot: Evelyn Berezin, Who Built the First True Word Processor, Has Died at 93

Evelyn Berezin, Who Built the First True Word Processor, Has Died at 93 Published on December 11, 2018 at 11:40AM An anonymous reader shares a report: Evelyn Berezin, a computer pioneer who emancipated many a frazzled secretary from the shackles of the typewriter nearly a half-century ago by building and marketing the first computerized word processor, died on Saturday in Manhattan. She was 93. In an age when computers were in their infancy and few women were involved in their development, Ms. Berezin (pronounced BEAR-a-zen) not only designed the first true word processor; in 1969, she was also a founder and the president of the Redactron Corporation, a tech start-up on Long Island that was the first company exclusively engaged in manufacturing and selling the revolutionary machines.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[neverlookatexplosions]

redactron:

It feels narcissistic to reblog my own art. On the other hand, I don’t have an external art blog, so it’s fun to see what people care about enough to blog on their own accord.

Thanks for bloggin’, rafffaff-etc.!

raffraff-etc:

via Redacteur (Redactron)

[d1-clic]

Qui était Evelyn Berezin, l'inventrice du premier traitement de texte ? - Tech - Numerama https://buff.ly...

Qui était Evelyn Berezin, l'inventrice du premier traitement de texte ? - Tech - Numerama https://buff.ly/2Lm32Mh

L'informaticienne Evelyn Berezin est décédée le 8 décembre à New York à l'âge de 93 ans. On lui doit le tout premier traitement de texte, créé sous l'égide de la société Redactron Corporation dont elle a assuré la présidence.

from Public RSS-Feed of D'1 Clic. Created with the PIXELMECHANICS 'GPlusRSS-Webtool' at http://gplusrss.com

[digicrunchpage]

Computing pioneer Evelyn Berezin died this week—she should be remembered

Enlarge / Secretaries use typewriters, before the word processor changed everything. (credit: Evening Standard | Getty Images)

Computing pioneer Evelyn Berezin died at 93 this week. She was most known as the designer of the first true word-processing computer. But she designed many other innovative computing systems and helmed Redactron Corporation, a company that helped transform offices by producing and distributing her word-processor device.

Born to Jewish immigrants from Russia in New York City in 1925, Berezin earned a BA in physics at NYU before working throughout the 1950s and 1960s designing early computing systems. She had become interested in physics after reading her brother's science-fiction periodicals.

In the earlier years of her career, she worked amidst a wave of innovation and new possibilities that came with the arrival of transistors. Among her early accomplishments was an airline reservations system for United Airlines, which "served 60 cities throughout the United States with a one-second response time and with no central system failures in 11 years of operation," according to the Computer History Museum.

Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Computing pioneer Evelyn Berezin died this week—she should be remembered published first on https://medium.com/@HDDMagReview

[suneth123-blog]

Word processor pioneer Evelyn Berezin dies aged 93

Word processor pioneer Evelyn Berezin dies aged 93

The woman who created and sold what many recognise as the world’s first word processor has died aged 93.

Evelyn Berezin called the device the Data Secretary when, in 1971, her company Redactron launched the product.

She grew Redactron from nine employees to close to 500 and was named one of the US’s top leaders by BusinessWeek magazine in the year she sold it, 1976.

She had earlier built…

[aneddoticamagazinestuff]

What is Word Processing?

New Post has been published on https://www.aneddoticamagazine.com/what-is-word-processing/

What is Word Processing?

An original 1975 film describing WORD PROCESSING and showing many early word processing computers. This restored educational film explains the benefits of word processing, shows the IBM Selectric Typewriter, the (Rare) ICS Astrotype word processing system (with LINC type drives), IBM Selectric Composer, IBM Mag Card II, IBM MT/ST tape reels, a rare REDACTRON System cassette, LEXITRON and others. – Nice vintage look and feel & good overview. Rescued from an old 16mm film. Provided for historical & editorial comment only. Comments are welcome. ~ Hope you enjoy this vintage classic. Uploaded by Mark Greenia, at Computer History Archives Project

[nbntv-blog]

Word processor pioneer Evelyn Berezin dies aged 93

Word processor pioneer Evelyn Berezin dies aged 93

Image copyright Eyevine/New York Times Image caption Evelyn Berezin said her word processor would help secretaries become more efficient at their jobs

The woman who created and sold what many recognise as the world’s first word processor has died aged 93.

Evelyn Berezin called the device the Data Secretary when, in 1971, her company Redactron launched the product.

She grew Redactron from nine…

[coolleftpiratebouquetposts]

Evelyn Berezin, who designed and built the first true word processors around 1970 as the founder and president of Redactron, has died at 93 (Robert D. McFadden/New York Times)

Evelyn Berezin, who designed and built the first true word processors around 1970 as the founder and president of Redactron, has died at 93 (Robert D. McFadden/New York Times)

Robert D. McFadden / New York Times: Evelyn Berezin, who designed and built the first true word processors around 1970 as the founder and president of Redactron, has died at 93  —  Evelyn Berezin, a computer pioneer who emancipated many a frazzled secretary from the shackles of the typewriter nearly a half-century ago by building …

from Techmeme http://www.techmeme.com/181211/p10#a181211p10