Evelyn Berezin

Evelyn Berezin was born in the Bronx in 1925 to Jewish immigrants from what is now Belarus. Her father was a furrier and her mother a seamstress. She read her brother\'s science fiction magazines and wanted to be a physicist, and she got her degree from New York University in the evenings while working in a laboratory by day.

Physics jobs for women were scarce, and in 1951 she took a post designing logic for a small computer company in Brooklyn, a job she had no experience of. She learned by doing it. Over the next fifteen years she designed one of the first office computers, a system for calculating firing tables, and, at Teleregister, one of the first computerised airline reservation systems, which went live for United Airlines and ran for years without a serious failure. In 1960 the New York Stock Exchange offered her a job and then withdrew it because a woman on the trading floor was thought impossible.

In 1969 she founded Redactron on Long Island to build what she called the Data Secretary, a machine the size of a small fridge that stored typed text on tape and let it be corrected and reprinted. It was the first computerised word processor. The company grew to about 500 staff before she sold it to Burroughs in 1976.

She spent her later years on company boards and as a venture capitalist, and died in 2018.