The inventor of copy and paste has passed away. 50 years ago, she laid the foundation for the basic functions of Word

Evelyn Berezin, the grandmother who invented “copy and paste”, has passed away. Her invention once freed secretaries and clerks from repetitive work, and also laid the foundation for the basic functions of document editing software such as Word.

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On December 8, Evelyn Berezin, who invented the first computer word processor in history, passed away at the age of 93. Born in 1925, Evelyn Berezin was a computer engineer and software company founder who turned into a technology company investor. However, the computer word processor she invented benefited the most people, which included basic document editing functions such as "copy and paste" at the time.

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In the 1960s, clerks, secretaries and other text workers often needed to make multiple copies of the same content. However, the office equipment at that time only supported printing one copy at a time. If there was an error in the file, they had to start all over again. Such equipment is simply anti-human today.

Evelyn worked for the Underwood Typewriter Company, the largest typewriter company in the United States at the time, and later joined Teleregister, a computer software development company.

During her nearly ten years at Teleregister, Evelyn developed a flight reservation system for United Airlines using the then-new transistor technology. This system could communicate with 60 cities and had a response time of only 1 second. It was one of the most advanced computer systems in the world at the time and ran for 11 years without any problems. She also developed the first computerized banking system.

In addition, the computer systems she participated in designing include weapons target calculators used by the US Department of Defense and systems that calculate the amount of bets for each horse at the racetrack.

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In 2015, Evelyn was interviewed by the media and talked about the reason why she started her own business. She said that even though she was very capable in the computer field, she was still constrained by gender discrimination at the time and could not be promoted to management. She also believed that typewriters had become an important office tool, but these tedious and repetitive typing tasks were still quite inefficient, so she decided to start her own business.

In 1968, Evelyn resigned from Teleregister. The following year, she founded her own computer company, Redactron Corporation, which provided computer system software services to customers around the world. The most famous product was "Data Secretary".

In its early days, the "Data Secretary" had no screen and was the size of a small refrigerator, including a keyboard for input. The entire product had 13 basic document editing functions preset, including delete, copy, paste, cut, etc. Later iterations of the "Data Secretary" gradually added a display screen.

These revolutionary features were later imitated by computer giants such as Microsoft and IBM, and evolved into the Word documents, Google Docs, etc. that we use today, and have become features we are accustomed to.

Redactron had a maximum of 500 employees and was later acquired by computer manufacturer Burroughs, one of IBM's competitors, in 1976. In the same year, Evelyn was selected as one of the "Top 100 Female Entrepreneurs in the United States" by Bloomberg Businessweek magazine. She was the only CEO from a technology company on the list.