Some people just get on with it. No fuss, no complaints, no whingeing about rights or unfairness, no perceived offences. Just do it. It’s a tough world, and it wasn’t made for you alone.

Evelyn Berezin was like that. She was a woman in the world of technology when it was populated almost exclusively by men. She was a woman in the world of business when women in business were assumed to be secretaries. She didn’t moan or cavil. She got on with it.

The list of firsts she originated were a match for anyone’s achievements in business and technology, male or female. I wrote about them in this blog Why Is This Woman Not Famous?  eight years ago.

Astonishingly she read my blog and responded, so we met up. Von and I, with our friends Mike Shatzkin and Martha Moran, took her to dinner at 10 Downing Street. She was bright as a button. She told us how as the only female physics student at Hunter College in the 1940s the boys all used to follow her home. And we weren’t surprised. Later Evelyn started and ran the Redactron Corporation, makers of the world’s first computer chip which they designed and shipped in September 1971 — Intel didn’t sell their first chip till November 1971.

What an amazing woman. As I had the only surviving Redactron computer, she persuaded me to donate it to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. Four men in white coats and gloves came and reverently carted it away. I wrote about it here: Goodbye Old Friend.

She died in Manhattan last Saturday, aged 93. A good innings. Damien Gaillard, fotoLibra’s TDM, spotted her obituary in the New York Times, as did Bill Kay, who has penned one or two obits himself for The Times. Here it is, and I was flattered to see they referenced my original blog post.

Goodbye old friend. I scarcely knew you, but I was honoured to make the acquaintance of a great woman.

PS: In case you think we only mingle with the great and the good, it’s true, we do — but the 10 Downing Street where we had dinner with Evelyn was a cacophonous restaurant in Manhattan, not in Westminster.

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