Evelyn Berezin (1925-2018) was an American physicist and computer designer who built early commercial computing systems at a time when very few women ran technical companies. According to the Computer History Museum, while at Teleregister she “designed one of the largest systems built at that time: a passenger reservations system for United Airlines, delivered in about 1962” - one of the first computerized airline reservation systems.
In 1969 she founded Redactron Corporation to commercialize her best-known invention: an office word processor she called the Data Secretary, with the first units delivered in September 1971. It could record what a typist entered and play it back for editing and reprinting, making it one of the earliest commercial products built around the new microprocessor and a forerunner of the computers that would later sit on every desk.
The Computer History Museum named Berezin a Fellow in 2015 “for her early work in computer design and a lifetime of entrepreneurial activity,” and she was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Despite this, she remained largely unknown to the public, a frequent fate for the engineers - and especially the women engineers - who built the machinery that later AI was constructed on top of.