Evelyn Berezin — Systems Reliability Pioneer
Today’s pioneer is know for having built the first true word processor. In the 1976 list “Top 100 Business Women in the United States” she was the only one that was the president of a tech company. This is the fascinating story of Evelyn Berezin.
Desperate Times Require Desperate Measures
In 1941 as the US entered the war, men where leaving for battle, so a former physics professor offered her a job at a tech company that was producing printing ink. She was 16 which made her inelegible for work in New York City, but she knew how to handle that:
I was prepared for this next problem because I had worked during the summer before and I knew enough to lie. I told them I was 18, which was the earliest age you could work in New York City. I was five foot nine and I wore makeup, so they did not guess that I was 2 years younger than that. Whew!
Of course her ambition didn’t stop at landing her first full time job in tech. She also went to college at night, from 6:00 PM to 10:00 PM, being back home after one hour on the subway, time she spent doing her homework. A total dedication to the advancement of her career, so she could get her degree in physics.
At school, she was not only the only woman at Brooklyn Polytechnic, but was the only woman who had ever been there. For her that meant she had to get the extra mark to show women could do well in physics:
I did end with a straight A average there, so I kept the flag flying for the women, which I very much wanted to do.
The First Automated Airline Reservations System: a Lesson in High Availability
While working at Teleregister, a company that specialized in building reservation systems, Evelyn Berezin designed the first automated airline reservation system for United Airlines. In eleven years, this system never went down. Let’s talk about high availability! Her description of this design is really interesting from a modern systems reliability perspective.
The SLAs where pretty tough. The system had to run 24/7, allowing for a failure tolerance of the central computers could last a few seconds max. Keep in mind that this is 1958, where one of the constraints is that she couldn’t use tubes, because downtime would be prohibitive, so they used semiconductors.
You couldn’t tolerate a failure of the central machine for anything more than seconds.
Then it was time to choose a location for a system that had to serve the whole United States. Berezin chose Denver. Requests would arrive there from about 60 terminals in various cities spread across the country.
The central computing system was built up using three computers, with a load balancer that would take care of allocating requests depending on the load of each machine. Why? They couldn’t estimate at the time how much the aviation industry was going to grow in the next ten years, so she had to be well prepared. If the system started to drop requests, both United Airlines and her company would be in big trouble, and her career probably over.
But her idea of reliability didn’t stop there. Each terminal had a dedicated line for sending requests to the central system in Denver, and a dedicated line for receiving responses. These two lines were duplicated just in case one of them would fail. Also if a terminal was misbehaving, a switch would bypass it making sure the connection that went from there to other cities in the country wouldn’t be interrupted.
What about shared storage in those three main computers? There was none. She implemented a sharded architecture with the drum storage (perhaps a first in database systems?):
[…] each of the drums were divided into the places where the specific trip information was stored.
So apart from this being the first automated airline reservation system, we can see that it pushed forward techniques for high availability which are very much relevant today.
Being a Woman in Tech
For Evelyn Berezin, it wasn’t easy to be a woman in tech. She got offered a job at the New York Stock Exchange to design their first electronic system, something for which she was one of the few qualified people in the world, just to be told by the board of directors that she wouldn’t be hired, “because the language of the floor wasn’t for a woman’s ears”.
So that tells you the situation of women at the time. What, I think, made it worse was that I had never had any problems working with men, even as a manager of men — even within all-male (except for me) engineering organizations
As time went by, she realized that she always had the same position at tech companies, running the logic department. Higher than that and glass ceiling was there for her.
[…] I’m looking up to the next role, to vice president. And I knew damn well that I would never get that job. That job was for a man, and I would never have it. I had learned the lesson.
So she solved the problem in full Berezin fashion: She created her own company and made herself president. Here she brought all her feminist values, even up to the company advertisement, which she signed herself. This is some copy from one of her ads:
After all, until the feminist, Katherine Gibbs, founded her secretarial school in 1911, women were as welcome in a business office as mongooses in a cobra pit.
And later she writes in the same advertisement:
Unlike your complacent sisters of the previous generation, you want freedom to get into more interesting and challenging work–work that’ll give you the chance to move into a staff, administrative, or managerial position–where you can call some of the shots. [emphasis mine]
So that’s Evelyn Berezin, a woman that had no problem to do what was needed to get her first job in tech, and that when she realized that in the corporate world she would never reach a high management role, she just went on her own and opened her own company. With that platform in place, she rallied other women to leave the secretary world in search of more ambitious roles.
Advent Calendar — Help us make it a book!
From December 1st until December 24th we plan to release one article each day, highlighting the life of one of the many women that have made today’s computing industry as amazing as it is: From early compilers to computer games, from chip design to distributed systems, we will revisit the lives of these pioneers.
Each article will come with an amazing illustration by @SebastianNavasF
If you want to see these series to become a book with expanded articles and even more illustrations by Sebastián, then subscribe to our newsletter below.
Credits
- Illustration: Sebastián Navas
References
- Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. Track Changes, A Literary History of Word Processing. Harvard University Press, 2016.
- Oral History of Evelyn Berezin. CHM, 2014. (https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102746876)
- Remembering CHM Fellow Evelyn Berezin (https://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/remembering-chm-fellow-evelyn-berezin/)
- Teleregister Corporation Brochure. (http://www.computerhistory.org/brochures/t-z/teleregister-corporation/)
- Wikipedia Profile (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evelyn_Berezin)
