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.

In 1996 Nasa and the White House made the explosive announcement that the rock contained traces of Martian bugs. The meteorite, catalogued as Allen Hills (ALH) 84001, crashed onto the frozen wastes of Antarctica 13,000 years ago and was recovered in 1984. Photographs were released showing elongated segmented objects that appeared strikingly lifelike.