7 ms·

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

170 points by NaOH 8y ago

kkarakk 8y ago
>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 8y ago
  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
mprev 8y ago
Slightly off-topic but it's interesting that they interviewed Evelyn for her own obituary.
- smacktoward 8y ago
  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!
mark-r 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      It doesn't explain why here, today, as more informed people, her achievements didn't seem to resonate with the HN community.
      - setr 8y ago
        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.
SeanLuke 8y ago
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-true-word-processor-was-invented-by-ibm/ https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/12/the-first-tru...
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
Animats 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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
dominicr 8y ago
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-true-word-processor-was-invented-by-ibm/ https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/12/the-first-tru... The Redactron Data Secretary was similar but instead of tape it used chips, which made things a bit easier.
- rbanffy 8y ago
  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".
EdiX 8y ago
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 8y ago
  "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 8y ago
    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_device)#IBM_Selectric https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_processor_(electronic_dev... > 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.
  - Finnucane 8y ago
solidsnack9000 8y ago
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 8y ago
  > 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

170 points by NaOH 8y ago

>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 8y ago
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

mprev 8y ago

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

smacktoward 8y ago
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!

mark-r 8y ago

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 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    It doesn't explain why here, today, as more informed people, her achievements didn't seem to resonate with the HN community.
    - setr 8y ago
      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.

SeanLuke 8y ago

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

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

Animats 8y ago

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 8y ago
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

dominicr 8y ago

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-true-word-processor-was-invented-by-ibm/ https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/12/the-first-tru... The Redactron Data Secretary was similar but instead of tape it used chips, which made things a bit easier.

rbanffy 8y ago
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".

EdiX 8y ago

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 8y ago
"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 8y ago
  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_device)#IBM_Selectric https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_processor_(electronic_dev... > 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.
- Finnucane 8y ago

solidsnack9000 8y ago

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 8y ago
> 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