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Berezin was inspired to design the keyboard as she remembers

May 24, 2019 by Ella Pickett

Berezin was inspired to design the keyboard as she remembers it from her childhood in the city of Sverdlovsk, where she was a student. "I tried to do some of the first computerized keyboards, but the idea was that you could do a lot of typing without touching the keyboard. I thought, 'I want to do all the typing that you'll do before you can do it,' and I thought, 'How can I make my keyboard different from the one we've been using for ages?'"

Her first name is derived from the letter 'k' and was initially a misnomer but is now known as 'Berezin.'

"When I started using my first keyboard, I thought it was going to be a big deal," she says of her name. "But I was wrong."

"My idea of a keyboard was that you could do a lot of typing without touching the keyboard. I thought, 'I want to do all the typing that you'll do before you can do it,' and I thought, 'How can I make my keyboard different from the one we've been using for ages?' "

In 1960 the team at Redactron, and Berezin's brother Redactron, started working on a programmable computer, called the IBM Bx. In 1971 Berezin was hired by a company called NXP, where she would be responsible for the design and development of the NXP System. But not all of her innovations were made possible by NXP.

"Berezin had always believed that humans were not machines, but instead could be made to act, to behave in ways that could not be programmed in the real world," says Alan Koehn, Redactron's head of product development. "She had built a computer that was able to take the user through a series of steps, and she was able to make it work for a long time."