Evelyn Berezin

Evelyn Berezin designed the first airline reservation system. Invented the first word processor. And built one of the first VC-backed tech startups.

And she did it in the 1960s.

Born in the Bronx in 1925 to working-class Jewish immigrants, Evelyn grew up reading science fiction.

At 16, she started night classes at Hunter College and later transferred to NYU, earning a physics degree in 1945.

She wanted to be a physicist.

But in postwar America, nobody wanted to hire a woman with a physics degree.

So she looked into something she’d barely even heard of: computers.

In 1951, she joined a Brooklyn startup called Electronic Computer Corp.

They said: “Design a computer.”

She said yes.

Even though she’d never even seen one.

That was her first major project: a computer that could determine how to aim and fire large weapons with precision for the U.S. Army’s weapons systems.

And it worked.

In 1957, she moved to Teleregister, a division of Western Union.

That’s where she designed the first airline reservation system, used by United Airlines.

It connected 60 cities.

Used microwave links.

Had a one-second response time.

And it never crashed. Not once in 11 years.

This was years before SABRE.

She also built the first computerized banking system.

Her tech processed transactions, kept corporate books, and moved money.

Before most people had ever touched a computer.

In 1969, Evelyn founded Redactron.

One of the first tech startups with a female founder and CEO.

She had no product yet. Just an idea: make secretarial work faster, less painful, and more productive.

Her solution?

A computerized word processor.

It was called the Data Secretary.

It looked like a mini fridge.

It had no screen.

It used an IBM Selectric typewriter for input and stored documents on tape.

It could cut, copy, paste, and edit. Without retyping entire documents.

IBM was still using relays and magnetic tape.

Evelyn used chips… some of which she designed herself.

She launched it in 1971.

The first unit sold for $8,000.

Redactron sold 10,000 of them.

By 1974, revenue hit $16.2 million.

The company had nearly 500 employees.

She wanted to empower women. But the consequences were complicated.

Years later, she admitted: “It never entered my mind that it might cost women their jobs.”

Redactron was acquired by Burroughs in 1976.

Evelyn stayed on as president of the division until 1980, then moved into venture capital.

She sat on the boards of Cigna, Datapoint, Standard Microsystems, Brookhaven National Lab, and the Stony Brook Foundation.

She held 13 patents.

And she was inducted into the Women in Tech Hall of Fame (2011) and the National Inventors Hall of Fame (2020).