Every time I’m tempted to complain about working with undocumented software I remember the ENIAC Six, six women who had to invent computer programming. Some scientists and engineers had built the first electronic computer, and hired these women (who were human “computers” along the lines of Hidden Figures) to run it. They had to basically teach themselves electrical engineering, take things apart that they weren’t supposed to touch, and talk to people they’d been told not to talk to in order to figure out how it worked.
Then they could start on the job they were hired for. (See the book Broad Band for more.)
This is another woman in the same mould.
Originally shared by Self-Rescuing Princess Society
“In an age when computers were in their infancy and few women were involved in their development, 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 Corp., a tech startup on Long Island that was the first company exclusively engaged in manufacturing and selling the revolutionary machines.”
“Berezin joined the Electronic Computer Corp. in 1951 as the only woman in a shop of engineers in Brooklyn. ‘They said to me, “Design a computer,”‘ she was quoted as saying in the 1972 Times profile. ‘I had never seen one before. Hardly anyone else had. So I just had to figure out how to do it. It was a lot of fun — when I wasn’t terrified.'”
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