Evelyn Berezin, Who Built the First True Word Processor, Has Died at 93 (nytimes.com) 93
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.
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.
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Strait from the Fortran manual - if you ask my mother :-}
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And here I thought all innovation was done by (white) male privilege and they invented everything to keep the subjugation of woman in place.
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" However, the other 99.99%"
LOL. It's not even close to that number, but good on ya for being hopeful I guess.
Re: Sexists, misogynists, and incels (Score:1)
Uh... I'll be sure to stop being a misogynist prick as soon as I'm finished beating my wife.
A privileged white male needs his priorities, after all.
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Being ugly is an impediment to finding love. Incels suffer pretty serious psychological issues, and yeah, the opposite sex and well even many of the same gender, shy away from the kind of behaviors Incels are known for.
Salute the innovators (Score:4, Insightful)
Everything we have is an improvement of existing technologies going back thousands of years. We wouldn't be where we are today if someone didn't come up with a way to improve on what we had. The innovators will live on forever in the new technologies, whether or not we remember who made the improvement.
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Ignoring the Troll.
I expect the people who wanted these word processors would like any other business make a business case for them, showing the costs and benefits of using them. Then sending that information to the purchasing manager to buy them.
Before networked computers most businesses didn't need much of an IT, and early IT departments were just expansion of the Telecom department.
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Masturbate and then jizz on a buscuit that you'll eat?
Re: Salute the innovators (Score:4, Insightful)
This is a silly article. what the hell do you want me to do with this information besides forget about it because I don't know what the hell you want me to do with it. It's not relevant to anything I need to do
Some people are interested in why computers work, which helps with how to make them work better.
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Well, nobody gives a shit what you do with it or how you feel about it, princess.
Someone who built something which pretty much everybody who has ever used a computer has used a version of has now died.
In terms of impact on the computer industry as a whole, that's one hell of an accomplishment to attac
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Let see, so you're saying you have no idea how the computer and software you use got to this point, and you don't care about anything before 15 min ago. You certainly don't want to know what your parents did before you walked out the door.
You're an ignorant little snot, and when you wind up in big trouble, and can't get hold of support to fix it, you'll pound the desk and go "how did this happen."
Grow up, kid.
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This is a silly article. what the hell do you want me to do with this information besides forget about it because I don't know what the hell you want me to do with it. It's not relevant to anything I need to do
PLEASE DON'T WATCH ANY NATURE DOCUMENTARIES. Nor any international news. Definitely don't read any articles about cosmology in Scientific American. Nor go to the opera. And steer clear of learning any information about the Second World War. And if anyone offers you a "Joy of Knowledge Encyclopedia", please laugh in their face because it's an oxymoron.
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We stand on the shoulders of giants.
And some of those giants look like every day people.
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We wouldn't be where we are today if someone didn't come up with a way to improve on what we had.
So you mean idea appropriation, both within and between cultures? My, don't let the SJWs hear that. They might have to give up their iStuff since Marconi, an ITIALIAN, basically invented radio waves which has been used, well, everywhere.
I've used a Teletype model 33 (GO Paper Tape!), an IBM Selectric, and have seen a Wang network. I'm far away from her, but have never heard of Redactron or Mrs. Berezin before. I hope she had a good life and mostly had fun doing it.
I guess she was using discreet 7400
Re: Salute the innovators (Score:2)
Regarding Marconi...there were others investigating radio at the time, but his real genius was building a profitable company around his discovery and monopolizing the radio communications business for years.
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first TRUE FFS (Score:1)
How many people are we going to go through to claim the accolade of creating the first this or the first TRUE that.
Yeah we get it. Someone died and a "journalist" wanted to applaud their great accomplishment which wasn't impressive enough to stand on it's own, so the True Scotsman gets rolled out. Ms. Berezin wouldn't have even recognized the phrase "tech-startup" at any point in her career, yet gets praise for that too.
Perhaps for demographic reasons this one will stick and this will be the last story abou
Re: More women than people think (Score:1)
True that. Men invaded the field when "programming" stopped being related to "inputting things on a keyboard" e.g. being a secretary. Salaries rose, men arrived, and suddenly programming became a thing women couldn't do anymore.
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No, actually, they weren't.
Never heard of her (Score:1)
Redactron, yes, but never Ms Berezin. What a fascinating career she had. She deserves more recognition than she got.
shackles? (Score:3)
a computer pioneer who emancipated many a frazzled secretary from the shackles of a job nearly a half-century ago by building and marketing the first computerized word processor,
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Redactron? (Score:2)
Too many years ahead of its time. Given the number of government documents that are issued nowadays with huge swaths of text hidden behind black boxes, Redactron should have been raking in the cash selling their machines to government offices.
First word processor? (Score:2)
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Hmmm... (Score:4, Informative)
In 1968, Ms. Berezin began working on ideas for a true computer for word processing, using tiny chips, known as integrated circuits, or semiconductors, to record and retrieve keystrokes for text editing. Since 1964, I.B.M. had been making word processors using a Selectric Typewriter and a magnetic tape drive to save and retrieve keystrokes. The tape could be corrected and used to retype text, but since the machine lacked semiconductor chips, Ms. Berezin said, it was not a true computer.
And thus the vaunted NYTimes drops "Computerized" from the headline and crediting her with inventing "The First TRUE Word Processor" which means a wholly different thing.
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sigh... so much for word processing...
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Of course not. Charles Babbage was a man, and this article is in the NYT.
It doesn't take a genius to figure out that this is yet another of those SJW articles that take extensive artistic freedom with history to paint women as "omg best ever but so oppressed". It even says "True Word Processor" in the title because if it had just said "Word Processor" it would be too obvious a lie.
As always, one has to wonder what these "journalists" *actually* think about women if they have to lie and re-write history to m
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Her chief competitor, International Business Machines, made devices that relied on electronic relays and tapes, not semiconductor chips.
This is absolute bullshit. IBM was one of the leaders in digital circuit packaging at that time. Fuck, they already had standardized semiconductor logical modules [wikipedia.org] five years before this alleged invention. Electronic relays, my ass.
The whole article is garbage.
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In fact I wasn't even skeptical going into the article - I was more curious about what her thought processes had been in "INVENTING WORD PROCESSING" - what was her aha moment, what made her come up with the concept of editing dynamically when liquid paper
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Turns out word processing as a concept already existed and she was just the first to digitize the process
How does it make sense to say that when this actually happened a decade earlier, around 1960 or so?
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Probably not, because when a man is recognized for his achievement we all know, without even saying, that the man accomplished something standing on the shoulders of others that came before him.
Whereas when a woman is recognized for her achievement, every story invariably has a huge feminist, sexist,& misandrist SJW agenda and is spun into a story which portrays her as a brave courageous one-woman-army heroine who struggled, battled, and clashed everyday against male-created roadblocks that were erecte
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No, the claim to the worlds first true word processor would require the same preponderance of evidence regardless as to the gender. While we could admire the ingenuity, a device the size of a small refrigerator that requires an IBM Selectric typewriter to function does not qualify as the first true word processor. I realize that it is currently fashionable to find a female equivalent
Deeper story in there somewhere... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the first I had ever heard of this system... it's really a shame she is gone now, because I would have loved to see someone interview her as part of a case study as to why that company failed.
It sounded like they had great machines that advanced well over time, a head start in the use of microprocessors, and a. lot of high end clients. So how was it that the company was bypassed by so many others? Was it to specialized where IBM was more general computing? That doesn't explain how other competitors like Wang on Olivetti also surpassed them later on.
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TFA says it got acquired by Burroughs though, so not a total failure. That's a common trajectory for a lot of start-ups and bigger companies also. In fact, Burroughs itself was acquired a few years later. I don't see anything unusual about it, just the usual competition and consolidation.
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Maybe not a total failure, but it seems like that company could have and should have been the one acquiring Burroughs, or even IBM for that matter.
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It failed because interest rates in that era were extremely high and that added to the cost of doing business.
That was true for competitors also though, who had to take out more loans to catch up. Redactron already had a good revenue stream and lots of customers, so high interest rates should have served to protect their position, not harm it.
Re:Deeper story in there somewhere... (Score:4, Informative)
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Thanks, I probably will take a look (even the longer one sounds interesting!!). Too much short form content these days with no depth.
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Probably for the same reason I have failed to be successful as a business (aka profiting in a big way from my projects). I consider myself an innovator and someone who pushed the boundaries of technology at various points in time. See this [slashdot.org] and this [slashdot.org] for public examples. However my problem is I'm not motivated by money, I'm not a good marketer, and I'm not interested in being a businessman.
Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, etc didn't become billionaires because they were the best software developers in
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From what I can tell, it was basically a technological dead end - she created a computerized version of IBM's older electromechanical MT/ST that didn't offer enough of an advantage over the older tech to justify itself, the company also didn't have the financial backing to undercut IBM because most customers rented rather than buying, and its whole approach was about to be obsoleted by actual recognizably-modern word processing systems with screens and interactive editing of text which other companies creat
Sorry, no, not the first (Score:2)
The first (or at least an earlier one) would be the IBM MT/ST [wikipedia.org]. Like the Redactron, it was based on an IBM Selectric.