Evelyn Berezin, who has died aged 93, invented the Data Secretary, the first electronic word processor for secretarial use, and in 1969 founded a company in Hauppauge, Long Island, to manufacture and sell it. She had bumped into the glass ceiling and it was the only way she could get a senior position running a company.

The choice of product was tactical. As one of the few women developing computer hardware at the time, she was a two-finger typist and said she had to stay as far away as possible from looking like a secretary. However, she needed something that a small team could create at a price low enough to sell. In the 1960s, most computers were so expensive that companies rented them. While this benefited the supplier in the long run, it required a large initial investment, and Berezin did not have the capital.

Although there had been earlier attempts at automating word processing, the technology had not advanced to the point where standalone computers were a realistic choice for secretarial use. Microchips had only just started to appear in affordable volumes, and the general-purpose microprocessor had not been invented.

Berezin and her small team created a system from scratch, designing a set of 13 chips to control the machine. Cassette tapes were used for memory and storage. The first version did not even have a screen.

Still, they could manufacture a Data Secretary for $2,400 – including the IBM Selectric golf-ball typewriter that provided the keyboard and printer – and sell it in the US for $8,000. This was affordable enough to be successful. They were soon exporting systems worldwide through a network of almost 200 agents, and enjoyed particular success in Germany.

Berezin’s husband, Israel Wilenitz, came up with the company name, Redactron, based on the idea that redact meant edit in several languages.

Redactron started in December 1969 with nine people and a $750,000 investment, shipped its first product in September 1971, and grew rapidly to about 500 staff. Unfortunately, many companies still wanted to rent rather than buy a Data Secretary, which Redactron financed with $11m in loans from the Bank of Boston. With the economy going into a recession and their interest rate climbing to 23%, Redactron could not survive, and the bank introduced them to Burroughs, a huge company in the world of accounting and business machines.

In 1976, Burroughs bought Redactron for around $25m and Berezin found herself the only senior woman in a company of “old boys”. In an interview for the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, she said: “They had no use for me at all. I was not one of them and they didn’t want to hear from me.” She left in 1980.

While that was the end of her career as an inventor, press coverage of Redactron’s success had made her name widely known. She was elected to the boards of several large public companies, as well as the Brookhaven National Laboratory. Times were changing. She said: “Everybody in the 70s was looking for a woman on the board, and I had the advantage that I had a technical background.”

In many respects, Berezin’s technical background was more impressive than her word processor, and it was hard earned. She was born in the Bronx, New York, to Jewish Russian immigrants, Rose (nee Berman) and Sam Berezin. He worked as a fur-cutter while she was a seamstress. Money was short, particularly after the Wall Street crash in 1929 and the Great Depression.

Berezin became interested in technology as a child through reading copies of Astounding Stories, an early science fiction magazine bought by one of her two older brothers. This motivated her to study science at school and, skipping years, she graduated from high school at 15. At 16, she added two years to her age (“I was five foot nine and I wore makeup”) and got a job in the research lab at the International Printing Ink Company in Manhattan.

She worked during the day and studied for her degree in the evenings. Her all-female Hunter College did not offer science subjects, but after the US entered the second world war in December 1941, a special programme enabled her to study maths at the all-male Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, and physics and chemistry at New York University. She graduated in physics from NYU in 1946, and was awarded an Atomic Energy Commission fellowship to study particle physics for her doctorate.

In 1950 Berezin got a well-paid job designing logic for computer systems that were custom built for specific tasks. At various companies, she developed systems to calculate shell trajectories for the US armed forces, to handle subscriptions for Fortune magazine, and for betting at the Roosevelt Raceway horse-racing track on Long Island.

The most impressive was an online passenger reservation system for United Airlines, which involved connecting computers in 60 US cities. Each node had three computers so that if one failed, the others carried on working. It was delivered in 1962 and operated continuously for 11 years.

While studying for her PhD, Berezin went on a blind date with Wilenitz, an Englishman who had moved to Israel but was spending a year working in New York. They married in 1951, and he went back to Israel. Berezin joined him there the following year, but she could not get a job. Both felt they would rather live in New York, and they remained happily married until his death in 2003.

• Evelyn Berezin, computer designer, born 12 April 1925; died 8 December 2018