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She did one version of the Magnetronic Reservisor too. That was American Airlines second semi-automated reservation system. It had magnetic drums to store data, but was a plugboard-wired machine, not a stored program digital computer.
They were struggling to get something that could keep up with growing air traffic. By 1952, Teleregister had built them a reservation machine built from relays and stock ticker parts. (Teleregister's main business was stock quotation boards.) Then came the version with a drum. Then the version with remote terminals.[1] These were still pre-computer machines. The version after that used a pair of IBM 7090 computers.
There's a whole forgotten technology of special-purpose digital machines. Teleregister built quite a number of them for stockbrokers, railroads, airlines, and such. American Totalizator, which built racetrack "tote" boards and their terminals and controllers, also branched out. (AmTote is still in business.) There were early attempts at word processing using paper tape, notably the Flexowriter.
All that stuff dates from the era of "if only we had an affordable memory device." Much of pre-computer digital information processing was a workaround for not having RAM. IBM had an electronic multiplier in test before WWII, and lots of plugboard-programmed machines. But affordable random access memory was years away. ENIAC just had registers and big plugboards. Computing had to struggle through the era of delay lines (slow), drums (slower), Williams tubes (fast random access but huge and insanely expensive per bit), and core (big and expensive per bit) As late as 1970, a megabyte of magnetic core memory cost a million dollars. Then came RAM ICs, and memory finally started to get cheap.
Here they had a series on Edsac, the first von Neumann machine. There they had a long mercury tube as main memory. The signal was turned into sound by a loudspeaker and sent to pass through the mercury tube (sound is very slow when passing through mercury), then on the other end converted to digital and looped back to the loudspeaker for the next trip (in loop). They say that this hack was invented during WW2 to store/recall RADAR signals.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lXJ-tYqPARg
The proper word for that is delay line memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay_line_memory
(sound is very slow when passing through mercury)
From your link:
“The high speed of sound in mercury (1450 m/s) meant that the time needed to wait for a pulse to arrive at the receiving end was less than it would have been with a slower medium, such as air (343.2 m/s)...”
The reason for using mercury:
“Mercury was used because its acoustic impedance is close to that of the piezoelectric quartz crystals; this minimized the energy loss and the echoes when the signal was transmitted from crystal to medium and back again.”
yeah, the speed of sound in mercury is not that slow.
Never trust anything you hear on youtube.
https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/sound-speed-liquids-d_715...
It makes intuitive sense, too. For sound to travel through a medium, the constituent particles have to interact with their neighbors to keep the sound wave moving. In a liquid, the particles are much closer to their neighbors (on average) than in a gas at normal pressures. Because of this stronger coupling, the average liquid (or solid) should have a much higher speed of sound than the average gas.
The trouble with delay line memory was not the speed of sound. It was that you had to wait for the entire memory (or, on average, half of it) to go around to get to any data item. More memory meant slower memory. Electronic arithmetic was much faster than the memory system, so delay line computers were very memory-bound. But not too expensive, once steel rods replaced mercury tanks.
> All that stuff dates from the era of "if only we had an affordable memory device."
I kind of figure that many of the techniques developed in this era are likely still in use in the embedded space, out of sight of the rest of the programming world. Is that hunch correct?
My understanding is that the Times is getting in trouble for this claim. Kevin Drum, who actually used earlier word processors, described it thus: "Berezin didn’t invent the concept of word processing; or the term 'word processing'; or the first actual word processing machine. IBM did all those things. She did, however, invent the first standalone word-processing machine driven by electronic components. It was an important evolution that lowered the cost of word processing and made it more reliable, but it doesn’t mean that Berezin 'built the first true word processor.'"
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/12/the-first-tru...
I was wondering how these worked, especially without a screen, and found a view point on this article that mentions the functionality of early word processors from IBM:
"...it was not a modern word processor that allows you to type an entire document and then print it out. You typed one line at a time on an IBM Selectric typewriter—fixing typos along the way—and then saved each line on a device that used quarter-inch magnetic tape. When you were done, you put a blank piece of paper in the typewriter and told it to spit out all the lines you had typed."
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/12/the-first-tru...
The Redactron Data Secretary was similar but instead of tape it used chips, which made things a bit easier.
It's really hard to imagine a text editor that works on a printing terminal, yet most computers come with one. Windows probably still has edlin.com and every Unix has ed, after all, "ed is the standard editor".
Wait, she not only created the first word processor but also the first airline reservation system? I agree with the comment from the article, why isn't she famous?
I thought that maybe it wasn't voted so highly because it had already been posted, and it had, but it didn't rate highly then, either. I think we all have a pretty good idea why she's isn't famous, and it has nothing to do with a lack of merit.
If you're trying to imply it about her being a woman, the article itself isn't helping your point:
“Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing” (2016), “she remains a relatively unknown and underappreciated figure, with nowhere near the stature of other women who played significant roles in computer science and the computer industry and have since been recognized by historians.”
That is, even amongst women of significance, she never achieved any real recognition.
It doesn't explain why here, today, as more informed people, her achievements didn't seem to resonate with the HN community.
Gender isn't really sufficiently explaining anything, really. At least not in this case.
The more precise question including gender is: Why does HN (and programmers in general) care about Ada but not Evelyn?
At least one possible, and better, answer might be: she didn't actually create things programmers cared about (Word vs Vim? Vim is by far the fan-favorite tool, for people who care about such things), and the only people who would care about who created what software, outside of historians.. is (hobbyist/hacker) programmers. And airplane reservation systems.. not only is that not something you'd expect the HN to like, it's something you could expect them to hate dealing with (and more particularly, writing).
Ada on the other hand computed in general, and we already know that programmers like computing.
The interest in one producer versus another seems far better explained by, well, the subject of their production; regardless of its notability.
She created the first computerized stand-alone word processor, but the tech inside was less important than what it could do for businesses - and from what I can tell it wasn't significantly more capable than IBM's older electromechanical MT/ST system, which also had the advantage of having IBM's name and financial resources behind it. It was also made obsolete a few years later by display-based interactive systems that resemble what we think of as word processing today.
To secretaries, who constituted 6 percent of the American work force then, Redactron word processors arrived in an office like a trunk of magic tricks, liberating users from the tyranny of having to retype pages marred by bad keystrokes and the monotony of copying pages for wider distribution.
The “tyranny” of retyping pages? But we find their liberation extended further just a few lines below...
Modern word processors...killed off the need for most of the old-fashioned secretarial skills Ms. Berezin was trying to enhance.
“I’m embarrassed to tell you that I never thought of it — it never entered my mind” that the word processor might endanger women’s jobs, Ms. Berezin said in an interview for this obituary in 2017.
Why does an article in the New York Times have to flex and bend to give a liberation angle to a word processor?
> Why does an article in the New York Times have to flex and bend to give a liberation angle to a word processor?
"It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilisation advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like the cavalry charges in a battle--they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments." --A. N. Whitehead
Slightly off-topic but it's interesting that they interviewed Evelyn for her own obituary.
That's not uncommon; a big paper like the Times will typically research and write draft obituaries for all sorts of notable people long in advance of their passing. That way, if it's decided when the sad day comes to publish an obit for that person, the draft can be pulled off the shelf and made ready to publish with just a quick pass to cover anything that happened in the subject's life since the draft was written. Part of the fact-checking process for producing that draft obit would involve reaching out to the subject to make sure it has its facts straight.
I've heard some people say that the idea of getting a phone call to discuss your own obituary is pretty morbid; but to me, it seems like it would be flattering. It means you lived a life notable enough to merit an obit in the New York Times!
What makes this the first "True" Word Processor? Looking things up on Wikipedia I find that IBM's Expensive Typewriter, a computer program for the PDP-1, existed in 1961, several years before the Redactron Data Secretary.
Both the IBM Expensive Typewrite and the Redactron Data Secretary used an IBM Selectric as input/output device.
Almost contemporary to the Redactron Data Secretary was the vastly more advanced NLS (from Engelbart's demo) which used a CRT for output and keyboard and mouse for input. The mother of all demos was given in december 1968, I couldn't find the exact date that Redactron was incorporated but the interview of Berezin by CHM gives it as "the end of 1968".
The Data Secretary might have been the first successful Word Processor but it appears that it's hardly the first one, but claiming that "Without Ms. Berezin there would be no Bill Gates, no Steve Jobs, no internet, no word processors, no spreadsheets; nothing that remotely connects business with the 21st century." seems incredibly hyperbolic.
I hate that every time I hear "first person to do X was a woman" I'm immediately skeptical because, if I look into it, most of the time is at minimum using a bunch of misleading definitions.
"Expensive Typewriter" required a PDP-1, a million-dollar machine (in current dollars). That was too expensive to be viable in a real-world business environment. The Redactron was a dedicated hardware device which of course was vastly cheaper, and achieved widespread success in the 1960s. So they were both "first" in word processing, but in very different ways.
http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102728582
> the Redactron system could facilitate automatic composition and printing of over 300 semi-personalized letters a day
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_processor_(electronic_dev...
> Evelyn Berezin invented a Selectric-based word processor in 1969, and founded the Redactron Corporation to market the $8,000 machine.
In a word, yup.
Right, one is a 'machine that can perform some word processing -like functions' and the other is a 'machine that a real user would use for word processing in an actual work setting'.
I agree but think this a period we need to go through, it will end on it's own when society thinking has changed and women inventions, role models, insights etc. have entered mainstream. For now there is some hyperbole but the pendulum will get to normal. This may take some decades but it's temporary.
> … I find that IBM's Expensive Typewriter,…
Expensive Typewriter wasn't IBM.
first person to free climb the nose route of el capitan was a woman.
go look it up, will be fun and you won't have to get angry about people celebrating women too enthusiastically as it is just true.
What's the pertinence of the sex of the climber though. It's not celebrating Hill that is the problem. In 90s USA I doubt she had to make more effort than she would have if she were a man, isn't it 'just' "an incredible achievement" rather than "an incredible achievement, for a woman"?
I'm open to being wrong, for example if it were "new deadlift record holder has XX chromosomes" then the sex is notable because males tend to acquiring more muscle mass.
In climbing men and women seem well matched?
At a different scale it seems to me like the condescension of applauding a woman for parking her own car, like "wow you can park a car and have breasts, unthinkable" when in fact sex and parking are largely (if not entirely) orthogonal.
I guess I feel you like you are not arguing in good faith if you can't see why a woman being the first to achieve a physically demanding task at world class level is not interesting. Even if we were to put reality aside and assuming that men and women have equal physical talents on average it would still be interesting if only because it is rare for such things to happen and I can't believe I am bothering to explain this.
My position is that you can't maintain neutrality on the sex of people who make achievements if you keep highlighting it. It's a phenomenal achievement, period.
I really, genuinely, can't see why Hill's sex, say, is important here. Could you spell it out for me?
I've no idea what nationality she is, if she's say Inuit, would that be notable relative to her achievement?
Being so enthusiastic as to exagerrate ends up taking away from it.
If you "have to" assume anyone who notices that "has to get angry about people celebrating women too enthusiastically" you're just pre-emptively calling a modicum of attention and seriousness misogyny. Allow for other possiblities, like confidence in one's own not being a misogynist, that can give a person the freedom to criticize such overdoing which ends up taking away.
Per your final paragraph a child recent told me that at school they learnt "Marie Curie discovered radiation".
Which was probably the child's own error, but the actual story of the Curie's [1] like others of that period (Cecilia Payne-Gaposhkin, say) is one of a community of scientists collaborating across borders of geography, and sex (, and perhaps class too).
To me it's very strange, if you wanted to say "anyone can be a scientist/engineer regardless of sex" then surely you'd de-emphasise sex. Instead it's made the primary focus, often put in the headline.
Usually too these things play towards the cult of personality, "X discovered Y" when the reality is often much more of a collaboration which I find it's usually far more pertinent than whether X had a vulva.
[1] https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/themes/marie-and-pierre-cu...
>To me it's very strange, if you wanted to say "anyone can be a scientist/engineer regardless of sex" then surely you'd de-emphasise sex.
It is because historically there has been a tendency for the contributions of women to be actively de-emphasized by most, that some work to re-emphasize.
For sure the end-goal should be for us to reach a place where we just don't worry about it at all, but if over the last 50 years nobody had been actively talking and writing about women in science, many young women growing up would likely see very few examples they could relate to and be inspired by.
>many young women growing up would likely see very few examples they could relate to and be inspired by. //
Is that how inspiration works for you, it's not for me.
When I see an amazing achievement I don't think "oh, wait they're not my sex/race/nationality/height/eye-colour they can't inspire me".
My greatest inspiration at school as a pubescent male was probably a near-retirement woman, because of her passion and knowledge of her subject, her sex being immaterial to that ... am I especially peculiar in this.
Sure, you want a diverse roster of characters to study, but exaggerating achievements because past politics or societal mores don't conform to your preference seems asinine to me.
[PS thanks for responding, I really appreciate conversation on this as so many appear to hold contra positions that I can't discern the logic of.]
>if you wanted to say "anyone can be a scientist/engineer regardless of sex" then surely you'd de-emphasise sex. Instead it's made the primary focus, often put in the headline.
The reasoning behind this (which I'm not saying is good or bad) is that people see women and girls are underrepresented in science, or lacking role models etc. so perhaps pointing out the achievements of women in science can help dispel the notion (perhaps less common now than in the past) of science being a men's field, or worse, an old boys club.
>the tendency of the tech world to diminish the accomplishments of women.
jabs like this are why i can't read any of these newspaper sites anymore. they should be forced to disclose the composition of their own IT/dev departments whenever they say unverifiable things like this.
also the person writing this article is a dude so i guess the journalism business is following the tech industry's lead. couldn't find a young up and comer woman to write the article? i know the author has a pulitzer but isn't this kinda thing the kinda thing you're whining about?
Please don't post off-topic rants on inflammatory subjects. An article may include a baity statement, but that's no reason to spoil the thread here. It's a reason not to.
Threads are sensitive to initial conditions, so it's particularly important not to do that at the start.