
Evelyn Berezin, 93, Dies; Built the First True Word Processor - NaOH
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/10/obituaries/evelyn-berezin-dead.html
======
Animats
She did one version of the Magnetronic Reservisor too. That was American
Airlines second semi-automated reservation system. It had magnetic drums to
store data, but was a plugboard-wired machine, not a stored program digital
computer.

They were struggling to get something that could keep up with growing air
traffic. By 1952, Teleregister had built them a reservation machine built from
relays and stock ticker parts. (Teleregister's main business was stock
quotation boards.) Then came the version with a drum. Then the version with
remote terminals.[1] These were still pre-computer machines. The version after
that used a pair of IBM 7090 computers.

There's a whole forgotten technology of special-purpose digital machines.
Teleregister built quite a number of them for stockbrokers, railroads,
airlines, and such. American Totalizator, which built racetrack "tote" boards
and their terminals and controllers, also branched out. (AmTote is still in
business.) There were early attempts at word processing using paper tape,
notably the Flexowriter.

All that stuff dates from the era of "if only we had an affordable memory
device." Much of pre-computer digital information processing was a workaround
for not having RAM. IBM had an electronic multiplier in test before WWII, and
lots of plugboard-programmed machines. But affordable random access memory was
years away. ENIAC just had registers and big plugboards. Computing had to
struggle through the era of delay lines (slow), drums (slower), Williams tubes
(fast random access but huge and insanely expensive per bit), and core (big
and expensive per bit) As late as 1970, a megabyte of magnetic core memory
cost a million dollars. Then came RAM ICs, and memory finally started to get
cheap.

[1] [https://youtu.be/F4d-OFDs1hY?t=32](https://youtu.be/F4d-OFDs1hY?t=32)

~~~
MichaelMoser123
Here they had a series on Edsac, the first von Neumann machine. There they had
a long mercury tube as main memory. The signal was turned into sound by a
loudspeaker and sent to pass through the mercury tube (sound is very slow when
passing through mercury), then on the other end converted to digital and
looped back to the loudspeaker for the next trip (in loop). They say that this
hack was invented during WW2 to store/recall RADAR signals.
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lXJ-tYqPARg](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lXJ-
tYqPARg)

The proper word for that is delay line memory
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay_line_memory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay_line_memory)

~~~
jonsen
_(sound is very slow when passing through mercury)_

From your link:

“The high speed of sound in mercury (1450 m/s) meant that the time needed to
wait for a pulse to arrive at the receiving end was less than it would have
been with a slower medium, such as air (343.2 m/s)...”

The reason for using mercury:

“Mercury was used because its acoustic impedance is close to that of the
piezoelectric quartz crystals; this minimized the energy loss and the echoes
when the signal was transmitted from crystal to medium and back again.”

~~~
MichaelMoser123
yeah, the speed of sound in mercury is not that slow. Never trust anything you
hear on youtube.

[https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/sound-speed-liquids-
d_715...](https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/sound-speed-liquids-d_715.html)

~~~
majewsky
It makes intuitive sense, too. For sound to travel through a medium, the
constituent particles have to interact with their neighbors to keep the sound
wave moving. In a liquid, the particles are much closer to their neighbors (on
average) than in a gas at normal pressures. Because of this stronger coupling,
the average liquid (or solid) should have a much higher speed of sound than
the average gas.

------
SeanLuke
My understanding is that the Times is getting in trouble for this claim. Kevin
Drum, who actually used earlier word processors, described it thus: "Berezin
didn’t invent the concept of word processing; or the term 'word processing';
or the first actual word processing machine. IBM did all those things. She
did, however, invent the first standalone word-processing machine driven by
electronic components. It was an important evolution that lowered the cost of
word processing and made it more reliable, but it doesn’t mean that Berezin
'built the first true word processor.'"

[https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/12/the-first-
tru...](https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/12/the-first-true-word-
processor-was-invented-by-ibm/)

------
dominicr
I was wondering how these worked, especially without a screen, and found a
view point on this article that mentions the functionality of early word
processors from IBM:

"...it was not a modern word processor that allows you to type an entire
document and then print it out. You typed one line at a time on an IBM
Selectric typewriter—fixing typos along the way—and then saved each line on a
device that used quarter-inch magnetic tape. When you were done, you put a
blank piece of paper in the typewriter and told it to spit out all the lines
you had typed."

[https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/12/the-first-
tru...](https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/12/the-first-true-word-
processor-was-invented-by-ibm/)

The Redactron Data Secretary was similar but instead of tape it used chips,
which made things a bit easier.

~~~
rbanffy
It's really hard to imagine a text editor that works on a printing terminal,
yet most computers come with one. Windows probably still has edlin.com and
every Unix has ed, after all, "ed is the standard editor".

------
mark-r
Wait, she not only created the first word processor but also the first airline
reservation system? I agree with the comment from the article, why isn't she
famous?

~~~
h0l0cube
I thought that maybe it wasn't voted so highly because it had already been
posted, and it had, but it didn't rate highly then, either. I think we all
have a pretty good idea why she's isn't famous, and it has nothing to do with
a lack of merit.

~~~
setr
If you're trying to imply it about her being a woman, the article itself isn't
helping your point:

“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.”

That is, even amongst women of significance, she never achieved any real
recognition.

~~~
h0l0cube
It doesn't explain why here, today, as more informed people, her achievements
didn't seem to resonate with the HN community.

~~~
setr
Gender isn't really sufficiently explaining anything, really. At least not in
this case.

The more precise question including gender is: Why does HN (and programmers in
general) care about Ada but not Evelyn?

At least one possible, and better, answer might be: she didn't actually create
things programmers cared about (Word vs Vim? Vim is by far the fan-favorite
tool, for people who care about such things), and the only people who would
care about who created what software, outside of historians.. is
(hobbyist/hacker) programmers. And airplane reservation systems.. not only is
that not something you'd expect the HN to like, it's something you could
expect them to _hate_ dealing with (and more particularly, writing).

Ada on the other hand computed in general, and we already know that
programmers like computing.

The interest in one producer versus another seems far better explained by,
well, the subject of their production; regardless of its notability.

------
solidsnack9000
_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 “tyranny” of retyping pages? But we find their liberation extended further
just a few lines below...

 _Modern word processors...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._

Why does an article in the New York Times have to flex and bend to give a
liberation angle to a word processor?

~~~
zozbot123
> Why does an article in the New York Times have to flex and bend to give a
> liberation angle to a word processor?

"It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by
eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the
habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case.
Civilisation advances by extending the number of operations we can perform
without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like the cavalry
charges in a battle--they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh
horses, and must only be made at decisive moments." \--A. N. Whitehead

------
mprev
Slightly off-topic but it's interesting that they interviewed Evelyn for her
own obituary.

~~~
smacktoward
That's not uncommon; a big paper like the _Times_ will typically research and
write draft obituaries for all sorts of notable people long in advance of
their passing. That way, if it's decided when the sad day comes to publish an
obit for that person, the draft can be pulled off the shelf and made ready to
publish with just a quick pass to cover anything that happened in the
subject's life since the draft was written. Part of the fact-checking process
for producing that draft obit would involve reaching out to the subject to
make sure it has its facts straight.

I've heard some people say that the idea of getting a phone call to discuss
your own obituary is pretty morbid; but to me, it seems like it would be
flattering. It means you lived a life notable enough to merit an obit in the
_New York Times!_

------
EdiX
What makes this the first "True" Word Processor? Looking things up on
Wikipedia I find that IBM's Expensive Typewriter, a computer program for the
PDP-1, existed in 1961, several years before the Redactron Data Secretary.
Both the IBM Expensive Typewrite and the Redactron Data Secretary used an IBM
Selectric as input/output device.

Almost contemporary to the Redactron Data Secretary was the vastly more
advanced NLS (from Engelbart's demo) which used a CRT for output and keyboard
and mouse for input. The mother of all demos was given in december 1968, I
couldn't find the exact date that Redactron was incorporated but the interview
of Berezin by CHM gives it as "the end of 1968".

The Data Secretary might have been the first successful Word Processor but it
appears that it's hardly the first one, but claiming that "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." seems incredibly hyperbolic.

I hate that every time I hear "first person to do X was a woman" I'm
immediately skeptical because, if I look into it, most of the time is at
minimum using a bunch of misleading definitions.

~~~
zozbot123
"Expensive Typewriter" required a PDP-1, a million-dollar machine (in current
dollars). That was _too_ expensive to be viable in a real-world business
environment. The Redactron was a dedicated hardware device which of course was
vastly cheaper, and achieved widespread success in the 1960s. So they were
_both_ "first" in word processing, but in very different ways.

~~~
PavlovsCat
[http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102728582](http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102728582)

> the Redactron system could facilitate automatic composition and printing of
> over 300 semi-personalized letters a day

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_processor_(electronic_dev...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_processor_\(electronic_device\)#IBM_Selectric)

> Evelyn Berezin invented a Selectric-based word processor in 1969, and
> founded the Redactron Corporation to market the $8,000 machine.

In a word, yup.

------
kkarakk
>the tendency of the tech world to diminish the accomplishments of women.

jabs like this are why i can't read any of these newspaper sites anymore. they
should be forced to disclose the composition of their own IT/dev departments
whenever they say unverifiable things like this.

also the person writing this article is a dude so i guess the journalism
business is following the tech industry's lead. couldn't find a young up and
comer woman to write the article? i know the author has a pulitzer but isn't
this kinda thing the kinda thing you're whining about?

~~~
dang
Please don't post off-topic rants on inflammatory subjects. An article may
include a baity statement, but that's no reason to spoil the thread here. It's
a reason not to.

Threads are sensitive to initial conditions, so it's particularly important
not to do that at the start.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

