Jewish Invention Myths: The Word Processor
The Word Processor is one of those ‘Jewish Invention Myths’ that you would be right to ponder concerning how on earth it all got started.
The claim – as exemplified by Aish – goes like this:
‘Pioneer Evelyn Berezin was born in New York in 1925 to Jewish immigrants from Russia. She designed the first true word-processing computer. She also developed the first automated airline reservation system. United Airlines put her invention into service in 1955. It served 60 cities throughout the United States with a one-second response time and with no central system failures in 11 years of operation, according to the Computer History Museum.
Berezin received her BA in physics from New York University in 1945 and an Atomic Energy Commission fellowship for graduate study there in 1946. Her interest in physics stemmed from reading her brother’s science-fiction periodicals.’ (1)
‘MNews’ agrees but alters the claim slightly to assert that Berezin created the first ‘text editor’ and the ‘first computer-driven word processor’:
‘Evelyn Berezin – Text editor
Evelyn Berezin designed the first text editor and the world’s first computer-driven word processor.’ (2)
Now let’s deal with historical reality: shall we?
As Kevin Nether remarks mechanical word processors have been around since 1714 when one Henry Mill patented one as a replacement of a sort for the book press, (3) but the first true word processor as we would understand it today was developed in 1973 by a company named Vydec who created ‘the first modern text processor, the "Vydec Word Processing System"’. (4)
So thus, Berezin couldn’t be the inventor of the word processor, the first text editor or the first ‘computer-driven word processor’. What we can see is a lot of conflation of Berezin’s creation of a stable and highly effective semi-computerised booking system for United Airlines in 1955-1962 (which while effective and a significant improvement wasn’t an original invention in the normal sense of the term) (5) with ‘Word Processing’.
As well as the poorly worded ‘Computer History Museum’ article which makes it sound like she created like Microsoft Word:
‘Redactron moved into its first building in December 1969. Some technologies that were needed to make a word processor were delayed, so Redactron engineers had to design and manufacture some of these themselves - much more of the system than they had planned - including a custom 13 IC MOS chip set, one of the first such systems implemented in the world. Redactron's first word processors were delivered in September 1971-one and a half years after the company was started with only nine people.’ (6)
The problem is that Berezin’s actual product was basically an advanced electric typewriter as the ‘New York Times’ points out:
‘The company's main product was called the "Data Secretary" and it was the size of a small refrigerator, had no screen, and the keyboard and printer was an IBM Selectric typewriter.’ (7)
So, we are supposed to believe Berezin created a modern ‘word processor’ (as we’d understand it) but yet this creation had no screen and also no ability to function as a ‘text editor’.
Therefore, we can say that no: Evelyn Berezin didn’t invent the word processor, the text editor or the world’s first computer-driven word processor but rather other people (specifically non-jews) like the Vydec company did!
References
(1) https://aish.com/10-big-jewish-inventions/
(2) https://mnews.world/en/news/the-great-jews-and-their-inventions
(3) https://thetech.ninja/history-word-processors/
(4) Ibid.
(5) https://www.npr.org/2018/12/12/676024428/evelyn-berezin-computer-scientist-behind-groundbreaking-word-processor-dies-at-9; https://computerhistory.org/profile/evelyn-berezin/
(6) https://computerhistory.org/profile/evelyn-berezin/
(7) https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/10/obituaries/evelyn-berezin-dead.html