Legends and Pioneers of Blindness Assistive Technology

An Oral History Project

DAVID HOLLADAY and CARYN NAVY

Side One / First Part

Date June 14, 2003

Introduction to interview with David Holladay and Caryn Navy (Tony Candela)

It took some convincing but I finally got the car service to agree to look for a house on a certain street in Westford, Massachusetts, west of Boston, that didn't have a number. The driver was to look for a house entitled, Braille Planet.

David Holladay, indeed, has a sign on the front of his house that says, Braille Planet. It is the last vestige of the business he ran, called Braille Planet, before selling his business interests to Joe Sullivan and Duxbury Systems.

David Holladay developed the first Braille translation software for the small, personal computer, the Apple 2 series. His software, BRAILLE-EDIT, went through various incarnations and still exists, to this day, and is sold and maintained by Duxbury Systems.

David's wife, Caryn Navy, who has her Ph.D. in mathematics from MIT works with David at Duxbury Systems today and was the inspiration for David's invention of the Braille translation software. Caryn needed a way to produce Braille quickly in order to teach her classes at the various colleges she taught at in her early career.

Our interview took place in their living room and occasionally on the tape you will hear the sound of their young, adopted daughter, who sat between me and Caryn on the couch while David sat across from us in a chair during the interview.

You can see that Caryn and David are still a working team today and they enjoyed reminiscing with me about their days at MIT, where they met, and the early years when Caryn was a teacher and David was looking for something useful to do. He certainly found it. He has been a prolific software developer ever since and a small computer user who uses Braille and also Speech which owes David Holladay and Caryn Navy a debt of gratitude.

(Beginning of Interview) [Note: the text of the transcript was modified by David Holladay to "improve" the punctuation, and correct the spelling of some names.]

• Tony Candela: I just want to say, David and Caryn, thank you very much for agreeing to sit and talk with me. We follow what we call an oral history model. And basically that means, it's good to know what proceeded ... in this case, what I think is a real monster event in the history of blindness technology.
• But its very good to know what kind of led up to it and also, how has it been going since. So I'll ask you some background questions as well.
• So how long have you two been married?
• Caryn Navy: Since January '77. It's been 26 years.
• Tony: Wow! Well, that's about 22 years longer than I imagined it.
• Caryn: {Laughter.}
• Tony: What year did you meet each other?
• Caryn: We met in 1971.
• David Holladay: And, just for the record, Caryn and I celebrate the anniversary of us first meeting as a much more significant event on our yearly calendar than the wedding anniversary. We have a whole ritual of what we do on that day; so that's kind of where we start our clock.
• Tony: What was the occasion of your meeting?
• David: We were both freshman at MIT and I would pass her by, going opposite directions to classes and I thought, she seems pretty fascinating, interesting and you know.... How a blind person could be a freshman in a place like MIT has got to be a fascinating story. And it's gonna be really hard for her to introduce herself to me, so if anything's going to happen, I'd better introduce myself to her.
• I went to the library, found a little book about Braille, improvised my own little slate and made a little thing with my name and phone number and introduced myself to Caryn in Braille and gave her the little note.... And somewhere, in some archives wherever we still have that little crudely made ... note.
• Tony: What's your version of this, Caryn? First of all, how did you end up on the MIT campus? What were you studying there?
• Caryn: Well, I didn't know what my major was since I was a freshman at the time, but I ended up majoring in math. I liked math and science a lot in high school and various people said, well, MIT might be a good place to go. I think my father's boss was an MIT alumnus. That made my father really.... Well, he had mixed feelings about MIT. He talked about how stupid his boss was sometimes, but he decided it would be good for me to go to MIT.
• Tony: David, where were you born?
• David: I was born in St. Andreas, California. My father was a co-pastor to two small churches in the gold mining hills of California.
• My father's gone through a whole bunch of professional changes and he decided that he didn't want to do something weird and exotic; so he decided to become a pastor. And then he decided to go for his PhD.
• Then he got himself over-specialized. So he ended up eventually becoming a professor of a very specialized area, which is something he decided in college that he didn't want to be. So, for a while he thought he was serving the people by being in a rural area, and that's where I was born. Sometimes I feel that because I was born in the town of St. Andreas I was born on a fault.
• Tony: {Laughter.} Did you grow up in that area?
• David: No. No. After a small number of years, my father decided that being a real pastor wasn't for him so he got his PhD. He got his PhD in an unusual place in the University of Leyden in Holland. So, my earliest memories are being in Holland and trying to cope with the fact that everyone spoke this unusual language. So I would speak it, and dropped it immediately when my family moved back to the United States.
• Then my father tried to get some sort of a teaching job and failed. He ended up being like a campus minister, serving coffee to college students for a couple of years--I think in about two years we moved to Boulder, Colorado. While he was passing out his resume he got a job at a small church-supported college outside Chicago in Elmhurst, Illinois.
• Then my family had this great need to travel where my father could be a professor of the Old Testament in Ancient Hebrew in Beirut, Lebanon, in a place called the Near East School of Theology. So I would say that one of the most formative parts of my life was being overseas for seven years in Beirut, Lebanon.
• I ended up being in the United States one year and then applied to colleges. Because I wasn't so grounded in the American educational system, my efforts at getting into college were largely a failure. And through a historical accident, it turned out that MIT had decided that living overseas was a prized thing in just the year that I applied. So, I applied to two safety schools and was accepted to both of them. I applied to five good schools, was rejected by four, and MIT accepted me. So, I went to MIT.
• Caryn went to MIT because her father figured out a way to get the Commission for the Blind to pay for it. And that was the cheapest thing for her family.
• Caryn: {Laughter.}
• David: I went because I completely didn't understand the college application process, and through some wild fluke MIT said, we like people who have been overseas. I ran into all kinds of people who have been this or that or the other. It was kind of a joke about, "if you've been overseas, you got into MIT that year".
• Tony: So, do you have a Jewish heritage?
• David: No, no.
• Tony: Just your father studied....
• David: Oh, yeah, my father, as Christian pastor, missionary, he studied Hebrew and the Old Testament as furtherance of a Christian ministry. At the University of Leyden he actually wrote the thesis on one Hebrew verb, which, it's still out there, if you wanted a book on one word, there it is.
• I met Caryn, who has a Jewish heritage, and by a creepy, crawly process, I just sort of kind of snuck in and snatched that little piece of identity.
• Tony: And you have two children?
• David: That's correct. Seth and Diya. Seth is twelve now and Diya is eight. She has some delays in borderline autism. She's sitting on Caryn's lap, right here. Some of the odd-mouthed noises you hear on this tape will in fact be Diya, and she just is an ever-present aspect to our lives and apparently an ever-present aspect of this tape and I think that's fine.
• Tony: So, Caryn, you grew up in New York City?
• Caryn: Yeah.
• Tony: In which borough were you born?
• Caryn: I was born in a hospital in Brooklyn, but my family was living in Queens at the time. And then when I was eleven, we moved to Brooklyn-Coney Island, Brighton Beach area. And I lived there until I went off to MIT.
• Tony: Did you go to the public high school system?
• Caryn: I did, yeah. I actually had limited vision up until the end of fifth grade. I read regular print and I passed as a sighted person. And then at the end of fifth grade I had a detached retina and then started using Braille. So I kept going to the public schools. I went to Erasmus Hall High School.
• Tony: Were you good in math when you were in elementary school, high school?
• Caryn: Relatively good in math, yes. Yeah, I think it was my favorite subject.
• Tony: It's very unusual to find anybody that's good in math, period. So whenever I find somebody, I'm always very respectful ... they have those skills.
• And David, did you notice particular academic strengths as you were growing up that you gravitated towards.
• David: Yeah. Again, my early history us full of all kinds of blunders and accidents and strange quirks of history. At age 14, I was mixing around with the wrong group of kids; played with an explosive device and blew off the tips of a lot of my fingers on my left hand.
• And I had surgery one summer and my parents were concerned that it would just become of miserable summer and they signed me up for some kind of math enrichment course in high school. And what it actually turned out to be was calculus boot camp because there were two college students who should have known their calculus but didn't. They were being intensively tutored and so for three hours a day, for five weeks, it was like unbelievably intense....
• The teacher was brilliant, I just hadn't taken algebra II, and I learned how to integrate, differentiate, hyperbolic functions and all this stuff. And after that they couldn't keep me down on the farm. Taking algebra II after that seemed kind of dumb. So I ended up in a very accelerated program.
• So, it was like a triple accident that I ended up being in that position and my best buddy had kind of followed me into that program, so we ended up skipping what amounted to a second year of math, because we had skipped a year in 8th grade. And so we ended up in taking calculus in the 11th grade.
• I was getting in way deeper than I should of. I also had the tendency of reading every math book I could find in the school library. I just absorbed it; I sucked up math. And I had a series of bad teachers in languages.
• A lot of people are good at math and good at languages, but I just found that avenue very frustrating. I love math, I love science; I just love reading stuff. I also enjoy reading history and economics. I was just one of those kids that enjoyed some aspects of it.
• A lot of the formal, formal part of school curricular I would have trouble with actually performing on tests, actually writing papers, actually doing the things at school it depends upon, I wasn't your brightest guy on the block. But it terms of knowing underlying concepts and doing just way more reading than I was ever expected to, that's kind of were I excelled.
• Caryn: I was more of a nerd, doing what the teachers told me to do.
• David: One of the reasons we were such a good team is, I'm all over the place, in terms of applying knowledge just from all over the place, but can't really stick to one problem. Caryn is able to apply laser-like academic intensity on one particular problem and just blast it by just mega brain power, a process which I have deep admiration for. I just stand by in awe. Our mental focus and wave style are so different that we've made quite an effective team.
• There have been a lot of times when I'll just say, oh that doesn't really need all that initiative; there's really no place here.... And Caryn would say: no, I can mathematically prove there's a bug here. And she would act like ... you know, rubbing my nose in it. There is a glitch here, let me prove it to you.
• All: {Laughter.}
• David: So, she would not allow me to be as mentally sloppy as I would if I were just on my own. There are a lot of reasons why, if I were just left to my own devices, none of these things would have happened. It is so important to understand that I was a wild and reckless, impulsive person and I needed a lot of people to focus and guide me. And the main person has been Caryn.
• Tony: You live in what seems to be a very lovely neighborhood and a nice house. And you have a family life and a working life going on at the same time. Right now, you're both currently working for Duxbury.
• David: That's correct.
• Tony: And I happened to find out that Duxbury, the town, is very far from here. The Duxbury system's located in Duxbury, the town?
• David: No, it was founded in Duxbury, and has since moved for a variety of reasons.
• Caryn: It's right here in Westford.
• Tony: So, it's right here. I see, okay. So, you don't have that long commute that I was imagining ...?
• David: No, it's a four-mile trip from our house to the business.
• Tony: The address of your house, despite my best efforts to get a house number, all I was able to get was "Braille Planet", on Fourth Street, in Westford. ... How did that come about? Is there actually a house number?
• David: Yes. Yes, there is a house number there, but it's dwarfed by that Braille Planet sign. It's actually right next to it. What I'll do is I'll repaint the two letters. They may have faded in the last couple of years ... so, to make it more visible....
• The company we've founded Raised Dot Computing, morphed into Braille Planet as part of its death-throws. Braille Planet only lasted about a year taking what was Raised Dot into a non-profit realm in an attempt to re-launch it, but that failed spectacularly. But in the process, a beautiful wooden sign saying, Braille Planet was produced. It cost $500 to make and the woodcarver did a great job, and I looked at that sign and: okay, it doesn't say 'incorporated,' it just says, Braille Planet and I thought, there's two things we can do with the sign. I could bring it to work and present it to Joe Sullivan and Gen, who are the two owners of Duxbury and just mount it on the wall. And the sign needs to say we paid so many thousands of dollars for the company and all we got was this lousy sign. Or, ask them very politely if we could have the sign to place on the house. And they said, no, you can put it on your house.
• All: {Laughter.}
• Tony: We're going to work our way back to this spot and then beyond, but I was very curious as to how the Braille Planet sign got on the house.
• David: Well, now you know the story. {Laughter.}. I personally would have gotten a more emotional charge if it actually would have been mounted in Joe's office that day. He was perhaps too clever to fall for that trap.
• Caryn: I'd like ... to take us back to the math in high school. Like the one story that really sticks out in my mind is ... I was doing fine in math, I really liked math a lot. Then, I was pretty nervous about geometry in tenth grade. Because everybody said: okay, that's going to be really, really visual.
• And when I was in tenth grade they had the New York City teacher strike. So, I think we had had school for a few days and then the schools were closed for about a month or something ... maybe even more than a month. But I took home the geometry book in Braille; we had the whole thing in Braille. And I worked through a lot of the exercises. Over that month, I felt really confident in geometry. So, that teacher's strike really helped a lot. So, thank you Albert Shankar.
• Tony: Irony. {Laughter.}. It's a good thing they went on strike. You would never have learned your geometry. And you were in New York at the time, so you probably were facing the daunted New York State regents exams at the end....
• Caryn: That's right, yeah.
• Tony: ... which I did too. We're all three contemporaries here. We're all born around 1953?
• David: That's right.
• Caryn: Yeah.
• Tony: I'll be out this way, celebrating my 50th birthday on a cruise ship passing Boston and the way to Nova Scotia on September 16th when I turn 50.
• Caryn: Oh. David's birthday is September 17th.
• Tony: Oh! A fellow Virgo, all right. When is your birthday for the record?
• Caryn: July 5th.
• Tony: July 5th. July 5th? You were ...
• Caryn: I spent a lot of birthdays at NFB or ACB conventions.
• Tony: Ah, that's right. That's right. Yes. You can't get anything done from the beginning of the first week in July until about the end of the first week of July with the consumer organizations.
• Are either of you involved with the consumer organizations now?
• Caryn: Not right now.
• David: Caryn, pretty much single-handedly, got her chapter of the NFB ejected from ... That's perhaps a story, not suitable for this tape, but....
• Tony: Well, I have to know now! I told you I wanted dirt.
• All {Laughter.}
• David: Caryn, tell the ... tale.
• Caryn: Okay. So, this was a NFB chapter in Madison, Wisconsin. I guess the chapter started in the late eighties, and I had been a member of it for the whole time. And somewhere in the early nineties--I was the vice-president of the chapter--we were having an open house to welcome new, potential members. It turned out the president was sick that day, so I was in charge. David was one of the people who was there as a potential recruit.
• David: As a matter of fact, I was asked by a third party .... Somebody else asked me to be a new member. I wouldn't have done it .... I would have not showed up if just Caryn asked me, but this other person asked me to be there. So I said, what the heck, I'll show up. Anyway, Caryn....
• Caryn: Anyway, part of the discussion was for people to say their impressions of the organization, and going around the room David spoke his impressions very clearly. {Laughter.}
• Tony: He wasn't shy.
• Caryn: Right. I didn't repute what anybody said. Anyway, word of this got back to the state leadership. Because of this and other things that our chapter wasn't doing well, the state wanted our chapter to be dissolved.
• Tony: Oh!
• Caryn: And that's actually what happened. Another chapter formed a couple of years later, well more than a couple of years, I guess it was probably around 1998--maybe like five or six years later. And I think that at that time, the previous state president had been taken out of office. There was kind of a feeling about new leadership and directions, and a new chapter formed. I joined that chapter and I remained in that chapter until we left Madison.
• Tony: How long has it been since you left Madison?
• Caryn: June of 2000, so it's been three years.
• Tony: Three years.
• Caryn: Hmm, hmm.
• Tony: Did you move out here specifically to work with Duxbury? Is that why you....
• Caryn: Yeah. When we became part of Duxbury, we agreed that we would move out here within a year. So, the merger happened in the summer of '99 and we waited until the end of the school year to move.
• Tony: So, the rough sequence with the companies was Raised Dot Computing became Braille Planet.
• Caryn: Right.
• David: What ended up happening, the true dirt here that hasn't really been publicly revealed, is that, to salvage ... to put a financial foundation to Braille Planet we were engaged in a very large contract with [the organization, RNIB, Royal National Institute for the Blind. And one individual there lied through his teeth to Raise Dot as to the status of things. Basically, he acted like this contract was alive and well, even though one of the people on our side, was a lawyer who had been warned to be careful of these guys who are really treacherous.
• What was pulled on us was so elaborate and so devious that ... We were working on a multi ... a $200,000 contract. We were hiring people and doing all this work for this contract and at the crucial moment, it was just said, 'what contract?' And so everything just imploded kind of instantly. Within days, we were in negotiations with Duxbury because that was the only way to salvage ... this.
• So that was really what ... We put all our eggs into one basket and then someone came and steamrolled over those eggs.
• Tony: What were you doing? What was the so-called contract ...?
• David: The contract was involved with a very elaborate web-based system, so that a group of transcribers could get their assignments through the web, could download documents related to that, upload things.... Proofreaders could download those things and it would all be scheduled in mass. You know, there are 17 errors on this chapter .... So, all of this information could flow back and forth. [Since] it's all on the web. And if it were put together it would be an amazing system.
• We were led to believe that all of this money was going to be used for it, so we hired web developers, we were doing mock up of databases ... lots and lots of work to.... Some of the staff produced an amazing demo of what it would look like when it was finished. It just blew your socks off. It was really, really intense. So that the whole task of managing potentially hundreds of volunteer transcribers on a huge number of projects ...
• A footnote: RNIB has a policy that, any blind person that wants any book Brailled can have it Brailled. It may take forever but they'll do it. And if they can train enough people, and then have a system like this to do a lot of the management for it, it may have really, really made all of that volunteer effort that much more effective, because you wouldn't have to have all these people phoning and calling saying, 'What's the status? Do you have any books for me ...?' People could just like ... 'That looks like a good project, boom, boom, boom,' and start working on it, without needing tons of human intervention.
• Tony: And the transcribing in this case is the transcription of material into Braille ...
• David: That's right.
• Tony: From whatever format it started out in.
• David: Right. Right.
• Tony: I see. To this date, did the project ever get done at all?
• David: I have no knowledge of it, and frankly I couldn't care less. I'm very, very.... I just mutter dark words whenever RNIB is mentioned ... or especially the individual in question who really pulled a knife on us.
• Tony: Ouch, ouch. So, what are you guys doing now with Duxbury?
• David: I do a variety of tasks as are assigned to me. One of the things I've done a lot of is documentation in writing, and I've done quite a bit, recently, on something called the SALSA, which is software to run the SAL, which is a marvelous device. One of the things I'll say is that it's a device designed to teach children Braille, especially those that might need an enormous amount of drill and experience. And I can kind of imagine my daughter using a system like that, who, as I mentioned has some developmental delays. So, working on a project that I visualize enhancing life of my own daughter is a very empowering experience.
• I'm not out there conquering the world. I'll leave that for my hobby, which we will not speak of unless you really want every little aspect of the story. I'm just doing documentation, doing support work, answering the mails, you know, supporting the mission of Duxbury. In many ways, when I was doing Raised Dot, I was often performing a lot of very mundane, simple little tasks: writing little instructions of how to this and checking on whether or not a certain embosser had a problem with pin 39 ... So, I'm kind of the master of dumb, little tiny tasks. And whether you call me president of the company or so low down on the totem pole that I don't even have a closet with my name on it, it doesn't matter. I still enjoy the work.
• Tony: So, what is your official title with Duxbury?
• David: I think it's so low down the totem pole, I think there's not even a closet that has my name on it. But that's okay.
• Tony: And your boss is Caryn here, right?
• David: No, my boss is actually Peter Sullivan. He's a dream boss.
• Tony: Is he Joe Sullivan's ...
• David: ... son. He's utterly brilliant. He's a wonderful teacher. One thing I've never been involved with before is windows programming, and though I have demonstrated at certain points a spectacular knack of not really understanding it.... There are some bits and pieces I have enjoyed a lot, and Peter's been really good at helping me in a lot of ways. I've been surprised at how much I've enjoyed the work at Duxbury.
• Tony: And Caryn? What do you do?
• Caryn: I also do kind of a hodgepodge of things. I do Megadots tech support and a few programming things like one little module for SAL, and I've been working on some translation tables for Duxbury Braille Translator (Greek and Hebrew). Those are the main development type projects ...
• Tony: Do you spend your day in front of a computer, mostly?
• Caryn: Hum, hum.
• Tony: How does your day go?
• Caryn: Yes. Yes, I'm doing one thing or another in front of the computer.
• David: ... or the telephone?
• Caryn: Yes.
• Tony: Before we get away from hobbies and things like that, when you're not at work, what do you each do ... Obviously you have your children who take a lot of your time and energies ... do you have other hobbies and things like that that you do to just keep you busy? You can go first, Caryn.
• Caryn: When I was in Madison, I felt a lot more active with community groups. I feel a little bit more isolated here. I don't really do too much in the way of hobbies right now. I like to sing a lot, and I was in a feminist choir in Madison.
• Tony: A feminist choir?
• Caryn: Yeah.
• Tony: Does that have to do with the song selection?
• Caryn: Yeah, yeah. And, also the way the group was run; it was all women--mostly lesbians but a handful of straight women who felt very supportive. It was called 'Woman's Song.'
• Tony: And here we are in a suburban town.
• Caryn: Yeah. Pretty different from Madison!
• Tony: Different from Madison.
• Caryn: Yeah, yeah. I enjoy cooking. Although, if you just have to do it, you know, get dinner ready, it's not as much fun.
• Tony: And the kids take up a lot of time from both of you.
• Caryn: Yes.
• Tony: As they should.
• Caryn: Yes, yes.
• David: We have two very high-maintenance kids.
• Tony: And what is your deep, dark secret....
• David: I spend a lot of my time, usually on the Internet, but a lot of other sources, books, studying, the current state of the economy, politics and I'm especially focused on the artificiality of the financial markets. The bond market, the stock market, precious metals, currency markets are all being controlled and manipulated, so that there's hardly anything resembling a free market.
• I'm just sort of watching its debt spiral and planning on surviving that debt spiral. And I'll talk more if you want, but most people turn white and tiptoe away when I start going in that direction.
• Tony: First of all it's a deep topic; it's also a frightening topic to think that we're manipulating, but it's good to hear that someone has a survival strategy that they're working on a financial survival strategy.
• David: Basically, I've talked to a lot of people, telling them what they need to do, and they all say that's crazy talk, that's 'end of the world talk,' so I'll say, so what's your problem.
• Anyway, I've been having a lot of fun. I mean I've had some moments when what I've done in the stock market has soured. But basically, I've done much better than the average amateur on the financial markets. We do have a fair amount of assets to play with and to protect. It's been gratifying to at least not see huge chunks of that disappear mysteriously. I understand the forces at work, and whatever happens I sleep well at night knowing that nothing really bad can happen.
• Tony: I'll be calling you for financial tips. Caryn, you know, I forgot to ask you before. David told us a little bit about his dad. I'm going to come back to you, David, so you can tell us about your mom. But, Caryn, tell us about your parents, the kind of upbringing that you've had.
• Caryn: I grew up in apartments in New York City, and my dad was a CPA and he worked for the City of New York for like about 40 years. He was really friendly and outgoing. Whenever I went to downtown Manhattan with him to where he worked, it seemed like everybody on the street would stop and say hello to him.
• So, he always liked math, so he always encouraged me in math. He would always say, I got a hundred on the geometry regents, let's see if you can do that too, stuff like that.
• David: The classic line, I got 99 on the math test. Whatever happened to that one point?
• All: {Laughter.}
• Caryn: My mom had come to the United States from Russia, which was Poland--whatever it was at the time--when she was about four years old. She worked for the New York City government, also. That's how my parents met each other. Before she got married, she worked as a comptometer operator. I don't even know what that is, some kind of business machine.
• Tony: What was the machine?
• Caryn: Comptometer?
• Tony: Comptometer.
• Caryn: I think so.
• Tony: Ah. Okay. I'll look it up.
• Caryn: At the end of fifth grade, when I got my detached retina--and my mom was pretty upset about that, my dad ended up being the person who ... was, "We can deal with this,' ... and ended up being the person who read to me a lot.
• I know I ended up being,.... Because my mom seemed really upset about it, I tried to act like it was no big deal. 'We don't need to be upset about this.'
• Tony: So your father ended up becoming the problem solver as it were.
• Caryn: In fact there was one point--I think I was in high school--where my father wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Times about problems with getting Braille books for students, saying that, now that there are computers around, we should be using computers to get Braille for students. That was pretty funny, historically.
• Tony: This would be the 1960's, I guess.
• Caryn: Yeah. Probably the late '60's. Or maybe he did it when I was in college, I don't know. I think it was probably when I was in high school, though.
• David: The rest, so they say is history. A nice prologue to what was to transpire.
• Caryn: Right.
• Tony: Before I forget to ask you, tell us about your mom. David.
• David: My mom was an unusual woman, able to serve humanity in the very best way. She was able to go from situation to situation. Right now she often works as a hospice nurse, helping families who have someone whose dying. But at a moment's notice she'll often, because of surgery or other emergency she'll just be there for a family member for a week or two.
• She's able to redeploy herself very well. She's a known radical, I'm sure her FBI file would be very engaging reading, being one of these people who believe nuclear weapons are wrong. And she'd go up to a site and say, this is wrong and pour blood onto the drawing board. Someone would arrest her; she would be put on trial, and then get a little bit of jail time.
• So it was a really, really interesting upbringing to have a mother of strong political beliefs and stand by them. Sometimes I feel like I've compromised far more than I should. She's quite an example. So we can kind of dig through some of the dates of her actions or whatever. There's a lot of family history. I don't have to go through everything, but she's definitely quite of woman, and at some moments she understates her own needs. So, I've kind of learned from seeing her frustration to be clear about my needs. You can't just spend your whole life ignoring yourself because that just causes deep frustrations. Problems, eventually have to come out some way or another.
• Tony: Where does she live now?
• David: She lives in northern Vermont, very close to where my brother Martin lives. They hang out together a lot. I grew up with an older sister and two younger brothers. My sister, Cathy, died; she was hit by a car just exactly eighteen years ago. I remember that this week.
• Tony: Wow! And Caryn? Siblings?
• Caryn: I have one older brother. And he lives in New York City.
• Tony: Are both your folks still alive?
• Caryn: No, both my folks have died now. My dad died in 1987, and my mom just like about a month and a half before we moved to Massachusetts. That was too bad because I was looking forward to being closer to her.
• Tony: Timing is unfortunately everything. How about your parents, David?
• David: Both my parents are living. They're divorced. My father has family in western Massachusetts. And my mother is just hanging out doing whatever she's called to on a mission at any one time. I'd tracked her down, but that could be very difficult.
• Tony: Do either of you recall being influenced by anyone other than your parents? Being influenced by anybody while you were growing up in terms of either what you liked to study (as you indicated you had people prodding you along a little bit here and there), either what you like to study, but even your eventual choice of career--any memorable people pop up in your mind?
• David: Well, I have a memorable person, so memorable, it's like a flaming meteorite passing inches before my nose- a woman named Noretta Koertge. When my father taught at Elmhurst College, which I believe was a three-year period, two of those years, we ended up living in the basement of a girl's dorm, just a very short distance from faculty apartments.
• So, I got to hang out with a lot of faculty. And one of them was a very young college professor of chemistry. She was a flaming lesbian, hung out with a psychology professor and they intertwined with our family quite a bit. They helped out. Our family was always hand to mouth, and they would present us with a toboggan so we would have tons of things to do during the winter. They rode around in this convertible. I remember standing up in the back seat of this convertible saying, God, my parents aren't watching this now.
• There were just all kinds of fun experiences. But she, as a chemistry professor very much encouraged me to think about math and science, gave me a book on science stuff, helped me in a lot of ways....
• I remember one, rather memorable evening, which was some sort of open house for the sciences at the college, where she set me up to demonstrate this Geiger counter right near a very minor radiation source. So I would be this little third or fourth grader shown here, and we'd put the Geiger counter close and we put this little barrier in front, this is the detector. The adults were fascinated--this little kid doing this science demonstration. I got all kinds of "way to go," "cool," or whatever. I would have to say if I had to trace my interest in math and science, so much of it would be laid at her doorstep.
• She has written some very colorful books about her life and one book in particular was semi-fictionalized, but there are little bits about her life at Elmhurst College. It's fun reading a book later on.... They're talking about ... and there was a particular sports area with a big swimming pool, and she talked about sneaking off with her lesbian friends from downtown Chicago to have midnight swims and then running across a particular Field, which is the same field that I remember running across, like on winter nights after going swimming and feeling icicles in my hair. So it's fun reading this book about her and her friends doing this. I can see my.... I remember doing this, running across this one field after having swum.

End of Tape 1, Side A.

Tape One / Side B

Date June 14, 2003

• David:
• I remember I had to go quickly to bed, because open swim time for faculty was right before my bedtime. It's just fun kind of remembering my own childhood, reading this woman's writing. She was definitely a strong, early influence.
• Tony: There's kind of a synchronicity there, too, an experience. It gives you a feeling of being grounded a little bit in your past.
• David: Right.
• Tony: How about you Caryn? Any significant, influential person?
• Caryn: I had a lot of really good math and science teachers that stand out in my mind. A couple of them I remember having crushes on. Some of the influential things that I remember are things that helped me become a little, I think, more well rounded. The reason I liked math and science so much was because I liked subjects where there was a right answer.
• So there were some other things that I think helped me deal with other things were more like talking about feelings and issues. And my best friend, from junior high school on, was a woman named, well a girl named Lynn Perell and she was like a red diaper baby. Her parents were really politically active, and Lynn was always kind of a rabble-rouser about one thing or another. So, I've tried to be a little bit more like her. And then by some kind of fluke I ended up going to a summer camp that was run by some flaming radicals. A guy, who had been in the Abraham Lincoln brigade in Spain. And it was pretty funny because by parents wanted me to go to a regular summer camp, not a camp for blind kids. And they were having a lot of trouble finding one and this commie camp said; okay we'll take her.
• All: {Laughter.}
• David: So you come home singing"Internacionale" ... How sweet, Caryn.
• Tony: Workers of the world unite. Did you find, when you were growing up, that those endeavors, where there were some answers (math and science), were they in any way a respite from anything that you had to put up with because of your visual impairment? Did you notice it to be, in any way, a comfortable type of place to get away from some of that other stuff, or did it just not have anything to do with it at all?
• Caryn: I never really thought of it in that way. I do remember, occasionally like being bored and doing math derivations. I had this summer job as a typist at some point when I was in high school, and not having enough work to do. I'd have my slate and stylus there and do like math derivations and stuff. But I don't think I felt it was a respite.
• David: Can I just throw something in? Knowing Caryn during her college and graduate years, I'll just say that one frequent point of conversation and reference point was a kind of like mocking the blindness system which often would track blind students to social sciences, and often the study meant, read a book a week or a book a night. And these poor blind kids were forced to spend an enormous amount of time reading and Caryn might spend weeks at a math seminar in graduate school studying the same five pages endlessly.
• So, if one wanted to go to an area where reading was very manageable, nothing was better than the so-called hard sciences. So, it terms of acquiring information, being able to digest it and work with it, all you really needed was a Perkins Brailler and some very modest amounts of input material.
• And so, while there's a lot more to the world than just saying, okay, I'm gonna pick math, you need a good aptitude and a good deal of experience and an ability to kind of work through things. But the tendency for the educational system is, 'oh, there's something on the blackboard, it's math. Don't worry Timmy, you don't have to know this.' And leaving the blind kids behind, led to unfortunate circumstances where a lot of kids had miserable times in college, because they had to do ungodly amounts of reading.
• Caryn: Yeah. I felt I was really lucky because by the time I became a Braille user, I already felt pretty confident about math, because I was sited up until the end of fifth grade. So the teacher would say, 'Oh, you don't have to do this, Caryn,' and I could say, 'Hey, math is fine.'
• Tony: I think you could say you are an exception to the rule. David alluded to it, when it comes to visually impaired, or blind, kids, and math and science, it's unfortunate that not more of them are encouraged to go in those directions. The teachers tend to take the easy way out. And it's good that you were able to say, 'No, I like that. This is good.'
• Caryn: Yes. But I couldn't help noticing that there seem to be a lot more blind people in math and science now, than when I was growing up. At least that's my impression, just empirically from conventions ...
• Tony: Yeah, I think you're right.
• Let's talk about Braille. And, we have to talk about Braille with you Caryn, first, because you started this.
• Caryn: {Laughter.}
• Tony: ... this dyad that eventually evolved here. When you were growing up--until you were in the fifth grade--you had vision. Were you using your sight primarily to read, or had you already learned Braille at that point.
• Caryn: I did not learn Braille. I wasn't in any kind of special class or anything; I was just passing as sited. Although I learned later that I was legally blind at the time, but ... well, I think, after, like, nursery school, I wasn't getting any special services. When I had my detached retina, it was right at the end of fifth grade, like the last week of school. Over the summer I got some talking books and then I started learning Braille at the beginning of sixth grade. The Braille teacher at my new school--she just had two students, me and a boy, but she didn't want to change her usual teaching methods. She was used to teaching Braille to kindergarteners and first graders, so she was having me read Dick and Jane. And so she wasn't very flexible about the pace. I was really lucky that we ended up moving from Queens to Brooklyn; my new Braille teacher was much more flexible. So I remember the first book that I started reading in my new school; it was called "All of a Kind Family," which is probably about a fourth grade level book.
• Tony: What was the title of the book?
• Caryn: All of a Kind Family.
• Tony: All of a Kind Family.
• Caryn: Yes. And then by the end of sixth grade I was reading Braille on grade level, and I was able to go into what they called the special progress program for junior high school.
• Tony: I see. Well, they say that if you learn Braille early enough in life that you have a fighting chance to get very good at it and sounds to me that you got in under the wire as it were.
• Caryn: Yeah. I think so. Yeah. Yeah. I know I could never read as fast as my friend Lynn, but ... you know, I do okay.
• David: Lynn is exceptionally fast.
• Caryn: Yeah.
• David: And your skill at Braille is very, very good.
• Caryn: Yeah.
• Tony: It's good to have other Braille reading kids around. So rarely do Braille reading kids have other Braille reading kids around to actually push you along ... same with adults, too. If you have other Braille reading people around you, you excel much faster than if you're just left to your own devices.
• Caryn: Yes. That's one thing about New York City, Lynn wasn't actually at my school. I used to hang out with her. We went to the Lighthouse Music School and Recreation program together.
• Tony: You mentioned slate and stylus before. Was slate and stylus emphasized as the primary writing mode, or how ... did you take to it?
• Caryn: Yes, in some ways it was considered the primary writing mode. Yeah. I was taught how to use it to take notes in class and I remember having exercises about writing [_____] {?}, slate and stylus writing Nemeth code on a slate and stylus, and all when I was in the sixth grade. It feels like a lot of things happen when I was in sixth grade.
• Tony: Did you actually use the slate and stylus in class?
• Caryn: Um hum.
• Tony: ... to take notes
• Caryn: Um hum.
• Tony: Did you feel that you were keeping up?
• Caryn: ... for a lot of classes, yeah. When I got to college, I think I used my tape recorder as an aid, also. Even when I was taping things, I would still take notes with the slate and stylus. Of course, nowadays, I have a Braille Lite and I don't use my slate and stylus that much.
• Tony: And the mechanical Braille writer ... were you using that as well?
• Caryn: Yeah. But I didn't generally use it in class.
• Tony: It's big and noisy and too ... much to carry around ...
• Caryn: Yeah. Right. Right.
• David: I mean, like in college, I definitely remember you took it occasionally to a test.
• Caryn: Yeah. For a test, ...
• Tony: Did you read Braille books, I mean in terms as just your hobby reading?
• Caryn: Yes. Yes.
• Tony: So, you got that good at it that you were comfortable doing that.
• Caryn: Yeah. Definitely.
• Tony: So Braille became for you the natural medium for communications.
• Caryn: Yes. Yeah. Definitely.
• Tony: Any frustrations in the early days with Braille that you can recall? I'm portending that sooner or later something about the obtaining of Braille, at least, pushed to the point where David came into the act, here.
• But before we get to that, just the Braille, itself, in the old days, were there things where you wish the Braille itself would be easier to deal with in some ways.
• Caryn: Well, it was bulky. I know that ... I was lucky enough that there was a lot of Braille available in school. And even for math, even if my Braille teacher didn't know all the Nemeth symbols, we had like four copies of the Nemeth code rule book in this storage closet in the Braille resource room. So I would just go and look up how do you ... If my teacher mentioned a new symbol in math class, I would just go and look it up in the rule book. And that was pretty handy.
• Not everything was available in Braille and my dad would read to me, and of course getting books from RFB. But, I wasn't really having problems with the different Braille codes.
• Tony: When in your life, did you first encounter a computer?
• Caryn: I guess at MIT. I took a computer class when I was in high school, but I think the computer that we were suppose to use was like broken the whole term. And, so we would do these exercises writing these programs, but we never got to run them. But I took some computer classes when I was a freshman at MIT.
• Tony: And at that point ... let's put a year on this. You were a freshman at MIT in what year?
• Caryn: I started in the fall of '71
• Tony: Okay. If I remember correctly -- I went to an engineering school myself -- any computer work we did, we did on terminals hooked to a mainframe that was in some building somewhere else. What types of computers did you run into ...?
• Caryn: When I was a freshman we would do our computer work on decks of computer cards and then submit the job. And I think it was an IBM 360 or something similar to that. Some later classes at MIT, I did use a terminal. But I sort of preferred working on computer cards, because I could punch out, and type out my cards and then have somebody proofread them.
• Tony: I see.
• Caryn: ... And not having somebody like sitting with me the whole time.
• Tony: Then you take the cards that you typed out and hand them to somebody. If I remember they used the word "batch."
• Caryn: Right. Right.
• Tony: They would run and you'd come back the next day and hold your breath. ... 'Ugh! ... It didn't work.'
• Caryn: Right. {Laughter.}
• Tony: ... kind of like delayed torture.
• David: In college, I used to hang around with some of the people involved in an organization called, SIPB, Student Information Processing Board. Apparently there was some line in the contracts with the federal government; the federal government would deserve the lowest rates that anyone was charged. And so if a student wanted to use the computer and was charged a low rate, the federal government got that rate.
• MIT set the rates at these stupendously high levels, and then set up this board saying you can give away $10,000,000 worth of computing power. So any student saying, 'I'd like to do this thing..'. ' Well you'll use $15,000 worth of computing power; you have it!' So, that way they've practically gave away computer usage to students.
• So this access to computers was this precious resource with these fabulous sums attached to it. But all you had to do was go up and ask, and you'd be given ... I never actually made use of the services, but it was just sort of fun hanging out with the people ... 'Oh yeah, we gave out $200,000 today.' And of course it was just a couple hours access to this 360. The whole time it was about this high chieftain of computers and whatever. I have a strong memory of just computer accesses being this very rare, precious substance ... obviously we don't have that anymore.
• Caryn: Somehow that's reminding me of the sensory ... what is it called? George Dalrymple's group. ... Office. It's part of MIT
• David: Sensory something.... Anyway, whatever ...
• Caryn: Anyway, that was another ... Not so much in my freshman year, but later I used the equipment that they had at this sensory aids lab where they had an MIT Braille emboss. I was able to use that as my terminal.
• Tony: How did that work, this device?
• David: It was basically a prototype of the LED 120. It was the very first page embosser ever made [it] was made at MIT. They made about 20 units, and that was used by Triformations as kind of the basic design which they reengineered to make their early page embossers. Up to that point, Braille displays had either been making little ribbon tapes, like a stock ticker or perhaps some sort of crude single cell display.
• Tony: I see. It's kind of like ancient history and it's only 30 years.
• Caryn: Right.
• Tony: That's all we're talking about.
• David: Right.
• Tony: But by the standards of this business, that is ancient history.
• Caryn: Right. Well, actually just thinking about that office, I think it was the Sensory Aids Evaluation and Development Center. And I'm just remembering that that was also something that helped me decide to go to MIT. I think my Braille teacher--my Braille resource teacher in high school had taken some summer course with people from the MIT Sensory Aids Evaluation and Development Center, and she came back and talked a lot about what great things they were doing.
• Tony: Well, that is a happy coincidence that such a fine school--which is a feather in your cap to go to--also had the development center that would be of extra support.
• Caryn: Yeah. Well, I think before I started at MIT, it was run by a guy named Dr. Dupress, and I think he died early so when I started MIT the director was Vito Proscia, who now runs IRTI.
• Tony: Yes. Yes.
• Caryn: And then he left ... I think he became a vice president of Telesensory, or TSI at the time. And a guy named George Dalrymple after that.
• David: There was also a professor, Mann, who was deeply involved, as a mechanical engineer. I remember going to the engineering department. Between 1959 and 1960, there was some sort of big grant. There was like sixty different projects to do stuff for blind people. Some of them were just very simple things like some little contraption where you'd insert a punch card and these little pins would drop down and the blind person could feel where the holes were in the card and you'd just ... no electronic parts so it's just a matter of pins and levers ... your classic 19th century gadget so to speak.
• But there was just all this huge outpouring of inventiveness in the 1959-1960 range, and so these offices kind of picked up some momentum from that. So Caryn and I were infected with the idea of using technology to do things, and I suppose, as a good prologue to what was to later happen. We used to joke about this mysterious machine called the homework machine. The way it worked, imagine, you would go into a corner of your room, and there would be an organ keyboard, a nice little Braille keyboard, and you'd just Braille in something, be it Nemeth code, or grade II or whatever and then you'd push a button and say, 'do it,' and out would come the printed results of whatever your work. Then you'd just hand it in and that would be your homework. And we'd used to kind of laugh and joke at the impossibility of constructing something like this. But once Caryn had finally handed in her thesis, I started work on what really amounted to the homework machine. And on an Apple II, I had set up a system where you could send in a VersaBraille chapter. You know, there's your raw Braille input and out would come a combination of Braille and ... would back translate Nemeth code and would back translate literary code, Grade II, and effectively become the famous 'homework' machine, and even though the cost would be, I guess, between $75,000 in equipment and God knows millions of dollars in development time. I was able to whip it together from existing dot matrix printers, an Apple II, with just impossibly tiny amounts of memory and just plug in a VersaBraille and serial port and off you were running.
• And amazingly enough, years later I kind of looked over the project and realized what I had done was take the nemeth code, and I sort of invented my own page description language, so I basically translated it into a series of commands of how to move, mathematically, like saving into a stack, and moving up, putting in the fraction lines, square root bar. And then I had a second program, which took these graphics commands and executed them. So it was sort of a miniature version of Postscript Adobe that I had invented on the Apple II in this two-stage process, and I had somehow, intuitively said, this was the only way to do it. And I suppose one other weird aspect of this is, as I was working on this I talked to quite a few experts in the field of blindness computers and all of them said this projected project of a reader of the Nemeth code and Grade II couldn't be done. It was just too difficult a project. And so it was just sort of like ...
• Caryn: It was totally amazing.
• David: It was a totally amazing product and I actually have an Apple II simulator that runs on a PC, and I've got the thing set up so I can take ... I've since modified the raw text, the VersaBraille tapes of Caryn's thesis to be compatible with this coding system. So I can actually display the entire contents of Caryn's PhD. thesis using this page display language on the screen of a PC ... Apple II simulator running. So this is all demonstratable, still existing. Unfortunately there's no, because of the limitations of the simulator, there's no way to get any kind of voice or any other feedback that can be appreciated by a sighted person, I mean a blind person. A sighted person can at least see it on the screen....
• Caryn: You can't make a printout from it.
• David: No. Because the simulation of the serial ports doesn't work.
• Caryn: Right.
• Tony: What was your doctoral thesis on, Caryn?
• Caryn: It was in the field of set theoretic typology. There was a question that, if topological space was regular and Paralindelöf, did that imply it was paracompact which is a stronger property. And it was an open question and I constructed a counter-example that was regular and Paralindelöf, but not paracompact.
• Tony: Can you explain those two words? Paralindelöf ...
• Caryn: Para compact says that ...
• David: Can I interrupt here? If you want an explanation of the thesis in terms, which are understandable by you. This is really not feasible. I have tried to figure out what this all means myself, and failed at it.
• Tony: Well, one thing I want is the spelling of those words for the tape, so we have that.
• Caryn: Okay.
• Tony: Para compact.... That is okay. It's the other word.
• Caryn: Yeah. Paralindelöf, P-A-R-A-L-I-N-D-E-L-O-F. Lindelöf was some mathematician ... from Sweden.
• Tony: The one good thing, among other good things, is that you were very much in the mainstream academic world as you were writing your thesis. Your thesis wasn't on Braille or anything like that. Did you consciously, at any point, even think about, 'do I want to do something that's blindness related as my thesis, or do I what to actually not do something that's blindness related'?
• Caryn: Yeah. I think as much as possible I wanted to not do something blindness related. I remember when I was a teenager dealing with a lot of blind adults who were working to help blind people, or were part of blindness organizations. And I thought, 'this is crazy, why do all these blind people work in the blindness fields. I'm not going to do that.' And, here I am!
• All: {Laughter.}
• David: That's one reason I made that little point about my father who found himself kind of gravitating towards obscure areas of academia--a study that maybe only 75 people might be able to understand. He decided not to do it and found himself eventually doing it.
• In college I made a vow not to be involved with computers and here I am. So, there's three human beings who ... made a vow, 'I will not do 'X',' and they turned out to be.... And I also made a vow to hate all greedy capitalists, and now I'm a greedy capitalist. So the ironies are ... heaped upon each other. I mean there's a Tupperware party that Caryn went to that changed my life. If she had not gone to that Tupperware party, my life would have been totally different. Caryn, you're on stage.
• Tony: Caryn, tell us about the Tupperware party.
• Caryn: David had been working for this small computer company that ...
• David: ... never paid me.
• Caryn: Yeah. They paid him in computer cards.
• Tony: It's happening to you David. No wonder you're a financial survivalist.
• All: {Laughter.}
• Caryn: Anyway, at some point they decided that they couldn't afford even that, anymore, so they laid David off.
• David: Well the whole company crashed and burned.
• Caryn: And I happened to go to a Tupperware party that was being hosted by our former housemate. And I mentioned that David was looking for a job and somebody there talked about a particular bulletin board at the University of Wisconsin that was a good place to look for jobs.
• David: Now I probably would have, somewhere in the next two weeks, discovered that and gone there. But the point being is, the next day I went there and one of the job listings had been around there for so long the paper was practically worn out. I took down the information and they were just about to hire someone, and they thought, well, for the heck of it, they'll listen to me. And they were so impressed by me that they hired me.
• So if I had not gone there the next day after the Tupperware party, I surely would have missed that opportunity. And that was a crucial job that laid the foundation for me being a professional programmer.
• Tony: What was the job?
• David: It was to provide database and other support services for the Clinical Cancer Department. So I worked on what amounted to a generalized database that everyone could do their research results and clinical trials on. There were also specialized computer tapes that helped ... Every center was supposed to indicate how many people had certain diseases and what was the outcome. There was a systematic problem that: if the records ... that if one field had this, but the other field had something else, they would be rejected.
• One of the things I ended up doing was writing my own program, which exactly mimicked all the error checking that the federal center would do, and then I would run all the data that collected through that and find all the errors. And we would either throw out the records saying, 'We're not going to submit this one. There are too many problems,' or clean up the records so that at that point, after my program was finished, we had a 100 percent success rate--no more embarrassing ... 'look, 12 percent of your records don't meet our standards.' And because of all the prestige and grant money that was on the line, this was tremendously important.
• So it was basically to provide computer support services for the Cancer Center and it was a really interesting informal place, but we all worked very hard and nobody smoked cigarettes there.
• Tony: Did you get your doctorate?
• David: No. I have no degree beyond an undergraduate degree. So, one of the things I acclaim is that between Caryn and me, we have an average of two degrees apiece ... she having three and me having one.
• Tony: {Laughter.}. What was your undergraduate major? Was it computer science?
• David: No, it was the antenna and microwave end of computer science. So, I kind of avoided computer courses during my college ...
• Caryn: ... electrical engineering?
• Tony: ... Electrical engineering.
• David: Electrical engineering, sorry. So, it was more Maxwell's equations and antenna design and kind of the hardware end of things--how chips are made and stuff like that.
• Tony: Somewhere along the way, you went from MIT, the two of you ... I'm getting the sense that you were not in parallel at this point you stopped after your undergraduate degree. And, Caryn, you stayed on at MIT. Is that when you got your doctorate?
• Caryn: No, I went to the University of Wisconsin.
• Tony: Oh, that's the connection. That's what I was about to ask. How did you end up in Wisconsin? You did it by way of a graduate program?
• Caryn: Right. Right.
• David: So to kind of give the historical arc, we met at college. At the conclusion of Caryn's college, she had a few choices; one was a graduate program at Wisconsin [which] offered. At least for the first year, some financial support, and another graduate program that didn't offer financial support. So, she chose the first.
• Caryn: I had planned to go to the University of Pennsylvania, but then very late in the year I got accepted by the University of Wisconsin, and they offered this thing called a traineeship and I changed my plans. It might have been around May or June, and also right when I graduated from college my parents bought me an OPTACON as a graduation present. I had first seen it when Vito Proscia showed it to me when I was a freshman.
• Anyway, so right at the end of college, I spent a couple of weeks living in David's family's apartment (or kind of an apartment), in the Boston area, and taking OPTACON lessons with a local OPTACON teacher.
• Tony: Do you remember the name of the teacher?
• Caryn: Nancy Tavis.
• Tony: Nancy Tavis. . Okay.
• David: She lived in Wellesley and my family had a place in Newton so it was a kind of convenient meeting point.
• Caryn: I ended up using the OPTACON a lot to read material in grad school.
• Tony: And Nancy Tavis works for the Carroll Center, now. Do you know?
• Caryn: I don't know.
• David: We don't know.
• David: Anyway, so that was like Caryn's arc through school, and then, kind of a pointer out of college. My own arc through school was a little more mixed and troubled. I increasingly got a fixation during my college years with forbidden information. Anything that smacked of 'I wasn't supposed to know about it,' I had this craving to learn.... And this got me very, very good at just amassing information, becoming my own mini spy agency: just learning, absorbing all kinds of different sources of materials. And I was a bit aimless. I chanced to find somebody who had some experience in Madison, Wisconsin, [who said,] 'Oh, Madison, Wisconsin is a wonderful place to be.' And just the way they described Madison, Wisconsin in glowing terms, at that moment I said, okay, I'll just go out with Caryn to be in Madison.

Brief Interruption

• David: So, I had very aimless, ill formed ideas of what I was going to do with myself. One idea was to just hang around New York City--kind of hang around hippies and yippies, or be a radical.... I was just very aimless and had no real idea, or conception, of what should become of myself. Because of this chance conversation in the dining hall I decided, I will go to Madison and hang out with ... Caryn. It seems like a great place to be and get a job and what have you.
• So I ended up, to Caryn's parent's great distress going out to Madison to live with Caryn. We were not married and this is all very scandalous and I ended up going to a computer club meeting where somebody was speaking about a firm in Madison called Mohr Labs, and I ended up applying to them. And they didn't mind hiring me at all because they had no money to pay anybody, so just as long as I hung around and would accept their promises--I mean, if the labor and hour people heard about it, it would be jail time for everybody. But I just worked, basically, as an unpaid intern living off Caryn's traineeship.
• And effectively what I got very good at doing is programming the 6502 chip, which is the chip to the Apple II computer. But the tools I had were very, very crude. That is, I could write assembly language, but I couldn't really give names to locations--like, say I'm writing 'jump to the print program,' or 'JSR, do a subroutine to the thing that prints out a character,' and I didn't have say, 'JSR to location FCA8.' And so I'd have to keep careful notes of where everything was and rearranging things would be a tremendous nightmare.
• And I have this particular philosophy that, to learn something.... The best way to learn something is with bad tools. And if you listen to experts on acting or artists or musicians, and someone interviews them and says, 'how did you learn your craft?' 'Oh, I had this teacher.... It was horrible. He just said, make a scratch line on a steel plate. And I did that for two years. And finally, he showed me how to do real engraving, and boy, I went to town.'
• So whenever I hear about a high school that has data or computer facilities or the best cameras in the world. No, you get the worst bleeping cameras you could possibly find and you force the students to work their butts off, just so they can barely get a single picture out. And you make them just sweat bullets to get anything to happen, and then you give them the good cameras. But the best schools in the world will have the worse tools.
• Tony: Recapitulating the evolutionary process helps you to learn it from the ground up.
• David: Yeah. So, basically, when I got a decent assembler, where I could actually say, 'jump to subroutine to the print routine,' I was so happy, I practically wet my pants. {Laughter.} Then, I was off and running. So this experience laid the groundwork for me being this master programmer of the Apple II computer.
• Tony: And by learning that way, I bet you're much better at picking out errors and figuring out problems because you still have the sense of the detail of the guts. How something comes to be.
• David: Right. Because of the design of the computer, I learned a lot more about the hardware then any Apple II programmer ever had to learn. I knew a lot about how the hardware does mapping for certain maskable/non-maskable interrupts. I really understood the hardware level of the 6502 chit far more than the average bear.
• Anyway, so that was kind of an interesting experience. Eventually that kind of crashed and burned. Then I went to work at the cancer department. I got an opportunity to work in another firm that had a relationship to do with handicapped applications, which was this odd firm run by this nutcase that abused his employees. One project that I was supposed to be working on was a database of devises for the handicapped as existed then: van modifications and communication devises, what have you. The concept was that this was to be used by counselors for disabled people in Wisconsin; they would have this computerized database. What it amounted to was cribbing other people's catalogues and other people's databases and using these resources and try to set up a good database program.
• I spent a lot of my time effectively writing code that is exactly duplicated by what Access does. It was basically writing my own software to accept a record, search for a record, print a record ... organize groups of selected records, etc. etc. etc. It was a very frustrating use given someone who's basically stealing other people's information.
• One of the things I've noticed is, because he was so secretive.... Because so much of the technology for the handicapped was at that time rapidly developing, the same idea would have occurred to other people. So they were constantly saying this person stole this idea; this person stole this other idea. So I got the idea that keeping things "secret-city" was an unbelievably bad idea. Because if you did something right in the open and showed what you were doing--yes other people could steal your ideas, but by being out there in the open you were much more likely to be a net absorber of good ideas than not. So, I learned the hard way, just watching this other person work totally in the dark that this is not the way to go. You spend all your time pissing and moaning, 'everyone's stealing my ideas,' and it didn't seem like a good place to be.
• I got frustrated.... There was especially this one episode where my employer abused a family friend. He promised him wages of ten dollars an hour, and then when it came time to pay, paid minimum wage, which was at that time about an third of that. I was just so frustrated by that, I just said, 'okay, I'll give you two week's notice.' I went back to by previous job for the cancer center for six months and then it was time for Caryn to break out of her cocoon as a graduate student and become a full-fledged professor at Buck Mill University in Lewisburg....
• Caryn: Visiting Assistant Professor.
• David: Nevertheless, you're flying out on your own and that was really the crucible for what became Raised Dot computing.
• Tony: So you got your first job at Bucknell?
• Caryn: Right.
• Tony: Where is Bucknell located?
• Caryn: It's in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. And people would generally call that centrally isolated. It was four hours from New York, four hours from Washington D.C., four hours from Philadelphia ...
• David: ... and four hours from Pittsburgh.
• Caryn: Right.
• David: It was just out in the middle of nowhere.
• Caryn: Yeah.
• Tony: So you went there.
• Caryn: Yeah.
• Tony: Did you follow her there, David.
• David: Oh, yes. Yeah. At that point we were married. Halfway through Caryn's graduate years we got married.
• Tony: So, what year was this, when you went to Bucknell?
• Caryn: 1981.
• Tony: '81.
• David: I was already doing some work in the name of Raised Dot Computing. Just little projects--I had gotten the names of a number of people who were involved, including Harvey Lauer. And I wrote to him with ideas of using VersaBrailles and Apples. And he sent me back a letter, which was just as encouraging as he could make it.
• Caryn had the professorship job; we had a house.... So at a certain point I was applying ... There were three institutions, that at the university itself and then two other organizations which seem perfect places to hire a computer programmer. I applied to all three of them and was rejected by all three and just kind of became a household husband--kind of hanging around watching TV, making grooves on the couch and not doing much of anything. So, I said, 'OK. If I really want to ... it was the sort of thing, in talking to myself, I said, 'I'm capable of great things--big projects.' But on the other hand, a lot of things that I tried to do, I was a bit of a failure on. So, in some ways I was a little scared of starting in on a big new project, because if I fail it makes me look bad to other people and to myself. I can't really make that boast that I'm capable of some grand and glorious ... 'what's-it.'
• And so I ended up ... Caryn had a VersaBraille at that point, had an Apple computer and I started work on moving data back and forth and then adding a Braille translator on it. There were several key aspects to this that I lay at the feet of Caryn. One is that she was the one who explained the need for a back translator, and at this point it is so obvious. Like of course if you have a Braille note taker, you need a back translator to make print. Like what's the problem? I was kind of thinking, getting the information into it and so Caryn said, 'you know there's a need for going the other way.' What?'

End of Tape 1, Side B

Tape Two / Side A

Date June 14, 2003

• David: I have this very strong memory of Caryn explaining to me why a back translator is crucial, and me going, 'huh,' and asking Caryn to explain again and going, 'huh,' and on the third time it finally dawned on me what she was saying, that I kind of ... 'yes, a back translator is a good idea.
• Another piece to this whole puzzle is that at a certain point Caryn had a ... This is sort of at the end of the Madison time when you were trying to find a job.
• Caryn took a trip to San Francisco and I joined her for a meeting at the American Mathematical Association, where they had a huge field of little card tables with different people interviewing for jobs. It was part of the whole job hunt to go to this conference.
• Caryn: That must have been about the spring of 1980.
• David: Yeah. I took a side trip to Telesensory so I had this rough concept of doing something with Apple computers, and VersaBraille and what have you. I made a brief presentation to three or four people at Telesensory. And I spent a little time listening to this great, wild, crazy college student and there were two things that they noted. One was I wasn't asking for a VersaBraille. Usually somebody would come and say, 'I have these grand, glorious ideas.'
• But I was smart enough not to beg for equipment. It seems that that's a good way to get someone mad at you. But John Beard, especially, who played a pretty crucial role in Telesensory stuff, took a very positive note at my ideas because I, right off the bat, said, 'of course you need a back translator to make this all work.' And of course if Caryn hadn't used a sledgehammer to pound that in to me, I wouldn't have been able to make the point, which so impressed the Telesensory people.
• They said, 'OK let's ... cooperate' with me. Why was cooperation important? Cooperation was important because they decided that I was significant enough and useful enough. They sent me which was, at that time, was considered highly secret material, which was the preliminary input/output specifications for VersaBraille, so I could really understand how to interface a computer to it. And it was all considered hush, hush, and top secret. I certainly wouldn't have gotten a copy of that if they hadn't decided I was worthy.
• So, all these things linked together in the most weird and unusual ways.... One of the things ... In lieu of salary, I had one of these Mohr lab (?) computers, and I thought, 'wow, what I'll do is I will make the ... Because I didn't even have the VersaBraille at this point, I will simulate the VersaBraille's interactions on the Mohr lab's computer, and I'll have it on the computer and I'll see if I can make it interact.
• I had all kinds of things simulating how the VersaBraille worked, and I kind of realized the input/output port of the Mohr lab's computer was unbelievably crude compared with the sophistication of the VersaBraille. So the actual point of juncture ... it was impossible for me to simulate, so this was a complete waste of time. But again, I spent many weeks learning each and every intimate detail of the VersaBraille because I was trying to duplicate its functionality on a completely different machine.
• So, some of these pieces are starting to come together. Me, bubbling with ideas, but having unbelievably strong knowledge of the 6502 assembly language, having a strong interest in the VersaBraille to the point where I knew every command--what their function was--because I was trying to write ... When you write an assembly language program, trying to simulate the actions of another machine, by gosh you learn that machine.
• And then, you know I was in the right place; I was in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania because of my own blundering. I blew every job interview. So it was time to put the pieces together. So Raised Dot Computing, as a software company was formed using Caryn's VersaBraille, using the Apple computer we had bought and using all this time I had on my hands.
• Tony: How long had the VersaBraille been out at this point?
• David: Not too long. And certainly the P2 version, the one that had a working serial port was relatively new at that point.
• Tony: And, Caryn, you were one of the early owners of VersaBraille I take it.
• Caryn: Yeah.
• David: Not the most early....
• Caryn: Right, but pretty early I would say.
• David: Very early in the game!
• Caryn: It must have been like the spring of '81 when I got the VersaBraille.
• David: I remember I got a flyer about the VersaBraille in the summer prior to our moving. So, we moved in the summer of '80. I saw a flyer from Telesensory. It was mailed in to that database company that I spoke of. That was the first time I'd learned about it. I immediately got excited about it.
• Caryn: At the point when I got my VersaBraille in say March or April, I was still writing up my thesis--in March or April of '81. It proved really useful to have a VersaBraille because, with a little bit of writer's cramp, you could be writing something on the braille-writer and crumpling it up all day long. With the VersaBraille, you could actually edit what you were writing. So I actually wrote it on the VersaBraille and then used a typewriter--a Selectric typewriter with a math element to type a rough draft, which I then gave to a technical typist at the university to make the official draft.
• David: But using a typewriter with changeable balls can be very frustrating. I took a paper clip and got it hot over the stove and then made different patterns of dots on the very top of the type balls so that Caryn could tell them apart. But even so, if you have a technical type ball in when you want the regular type you have a page written in Greek letters when you really mean to have straight text. So, it can be very frustrating for a blind person to be told that the last two pages you typed are complete garbage.
• Tony: Oh, gosh!
• Caryn: This is a bit of a digression back to the question you asked earlier about drawbacks with braille. One drawback is you couldn't just turn in your assignments in braille to a mainstream teacher. Regular stuff--you could do it on a typewriter. But for math, forget it. As a grad student I got a Selectric typewriter with chargeable elements, but that had its drawbacks.
• Tony: Just to outline the process--essentially a two-step process of producing raw material as it where in braille, and then having to literally transcribe it with the electric typewriter. We all did this back then and just said, 'this is a necessary evil,' and we worked at it.
• David: A key point to make about the history of Raised Dot is that Raised Dot did not evolve organically around me trying to meet Caryn's immediate needs as a college professor. Instead, it was my desire to do something for the wider world.
• Caryn's role in the earliest days was a viable model of what the life of a professional person was. I was able to immediately absorb the idea that spending hours reading manuals is deeply frustrating, what the daily life cycle was like--all the frustrations and issues involved. I could get to the heart of running a computer program that did something useful; so, the earliest users were counselors for the blind or other teachers or this, that and the other. Because Caryn's need was math and the first software that I did, just straight text, was of little interest.
• I suppose I could draw a little bit of a parallel to the story of Louis Braille. Everyone remembers the braille code and thinks about books and straight text. His main burning desire was music and he really invented braille to be able to write down and memorize music passages so he could play the organ. So, its kind of an ironic thing that his gift was the literary code in terms of how it was used by millions around the world, or whatever the number of Braille users are.
• In a sense Caryn and I ... Our burning interest was math, but the first baby step was to work with straight text because that was the easiest thing to work on. Ultimately our goal was to do things with mathematical notation, because that was what Caryn really needed.
• Tony: A problem needing a solution that ended up having a spread effect--that might not even been obvious at the time.
• David: Right. So, the first stages were to write software that, like a text editing system, using voice that could just move material back and forth between the VersaBraille. The original software was designed strictly around the VersaBraille as a model. The VersaBraille had this limitation of allowing editing of only one thousand characters at a time. My system allowed editing of four thousand characters at a time. So you could kind of drop some text in from the VersaBraille, doing a little more widespread editing and moving ... the fussy editing you could do on the VersaBraille, but the larger editing was focused around rearranging big blocks of text and smoothing things around as its primary goal. So that was kind of an interesting design process. How do you design a word processor where you were more focused on big chunks being slung around as opposed to the micro editing? Of course the micro editing had to be there.
• Harvey Lauer was really crucial because he took a look at my early stuff and said, 'No, no, no. If you make the following simple changes then somebody could be efficient with speech using your program.' And he helped fine-tune the software through a number of revisions to get it to the point where it would work well.
• In fact one fun story about Harvey is the first practical software I sent to him, I quickly got back with a list of around fifteen or so suggestions to improve it. So it took me a week or two to knock down all of the issues. I sent the disk out, and almost immediately I got this list of another fifteen suggestions and I thought, okay, something's weird here, something doesn't smell right. So I called him up and said, 'What's going on here?' And it turned out he had the list of 30 or so things from the beginning about this.... 'David is such a bright kid, and he has such promise. It would be so horrible if we discourage him.' So he divided the list in two, gave me half the list so as not to discourage me; keep me in the field. These changes were absolutely vital, but he wanted to kind of entice me to stay in the field and not just [say], 'because blind people have just these impossible lists of demands.'
• Anyway, so I worked through all those changes and then worked in braille translators. The forward and back translators each took about a month--just getting some basic translator working. Of course the refinements took a lot longer than that, long tortured history of different stages, which refinement, this, that and the other.
• Just to ... give a kind of history: the first product I sold that actually had the translators in them was sold December of 1981. That's kind of like the opening of Raised Dot as a company selling you products. Customer number one got a product that would allow a braille translation. The program was hopelessly weird. You had to do some direct modification of certain lines of the code in order to switch it from voice to non-voice. It was just ... And it took awhile for lots of other pieces to come together.
• Caryn: And now the voice at that time was echo? Text talker?
• David: Yeah. I think so. I think it was echo. Echo was around there at that time as a low-cost synthesizer.
• Tony: And the computer was the Apple II?
• David: Yeah, the Apple II. I'll mention two inventions that were added into the software which was sold under the name of BRAILLE-EDIT being very careful to capitalize Braille and Edit, and with hyphen in-between the two, because there's a similar name product that Bob Stepp had.
• Two concepts: one was the stored global replace. An early piece of the product was to have the manuals for the Apple II on VersaBraille tape. So I was able to obtain from Apple Computer the floppy disks of a lot of their manuals. And then I would process them through my early software, of course finding all kinds of hiccups or deficiencies, which I would try to repair just so I could accomplish this goal of producing these manuals on VersaBraille tape. One of the things I was constantly doing was something like three carriage returns changed to two carriage returns to kind of like, if there's five carriage returns, it'll all get down to two carriage returns. Two carriage returns turn into a paragraph marker; a single carriage return turns into a space. It would be kind of a classic kind of thing that you turn something with a lot of carriage returns into symbology that I was using to make things more readable. Then I said, okay, this is an actual listing. I shouldn't have taken out those carriage returns and put them back in. It was just such a long laborious process in transcribing that we're all familiar with.
• At one point I was invited to a demonstration at Bucknell to a very high-tech optical scanner which I understand costs like $15 or $20,000. And it has a lot of features you don't find in your run-of-the-mill scanner; that's very inexpensive nowadays. And one key feature they were talking about was it could have a series of global replace tables, and you would just say, I want table "X." So when the material's were ready and would do all this ... from this string to this string--all based on pre-store tables. And I'd go something like this, 'a pre-store table? What an idea,' and in a few days I had a modification. So you can say this file is not meant for ordinary text is ... a list of changes to be done. So in one place I could say change three carriage returns, two two carriage returns, change this to this, and this to that. And you would just say, okay, import this, run my global replace, and it would just way, way speeded things up, because you wouldn't have to key in all those changes again, again, and again.
• Another important innovation was kind of a bootstrapping process where by you could put up a product, and get a single character ... to say, 'I want to configure the product,' or you could just say, like '* E,' meaning I want to configure it using the echo as a means of doing it. And you can, at that point, hear the questions and you could give responses. My VersaBraille is in slot two. I have one disk drive; I don't have two disk drives. And then, at the end, give a name for that configuration. And the next time through, you could just type in the name you gave it, and this very complex table, describing the hardware and your preferences, and what screen size, and what this and it would all happen.
• It took a while to get ... how to bootstrap, ... to get ... You have this flexible equipment. How do you allow a blind person to configure it? How do you allow ... tell the computer, yes we have a blind person; we want to use this methodology to at least bootstrap to get started. One choice of file names you could use would just be the carriage return key so that the next time you were in you could you could literally just bang the carriage return key and you're off and running with your choices.
• So working that through, which at this point doesn't seem like such a big deal, but there were so many different hits and starts, to be able to invent something that was like practical that people could later invent. And, further, the next generation of the software which came later, which under the name of BEX, again on the Apple II, we kind of bootstrap on that, and kind of cleverly you indicate the level of the product: whether you are at the learner level, medium level or the advanced level.
• Medium level is pegged at roughly the complexity of the prior product. And so you hit a period to go to the learner level, the star for the medium level, and the ampersand for the advanced level. And the period, just being a small dot was kind of like there's more stuff to the punctuation characters. You're moving on the ampersand would more stuff, the star, the same character used in the previous product. You wouldn't believe how much time was spent coming up with the list of punctuation characters that would represent those levels, but it was pretty darn swell.
• And through this, at a certain point, I think we spoke of December '81 as being the opening point of selling the product with a translator during the spring, around March, April or so of '82, was my attempt to write a program that would make use of the Nemeth code and pronounce square roots and whatever. And, as I indicated before, by using something a kin to a page description language where you say, 'switch to the Greek alphabet to this character, move up so much and print this key and move down, print this piece and the pieces together would form a large math symbol.' We're able to get credible, displayed mathematics. So it got to the point where Caryn could just write out a lot of material on VersaBraille, giving just a simple command--or two character command--on the Apple and a simple command on the VersaBraille, execute a combination that would transfer the data and then it would do the back translation, and then this final graphic step of grinding things out.
• I don't want to get too technical, but there are lots of things I invented in that process which were absolutely brilliant. The characters on the Apple screen were arranged at 24 characters high and 40 wide. And what I did was pretend that the top half of the screen was the left side of an equation or a single line, and the bottom half of the screen was the right half. So I effectively had 12 characters high to write my square roots and fractions and Greek letters and what have you.
• So I would assemble one line on the screen and then I wrote the special printer driver, which would take the contents ... kind of figure out how much fluff there was in the top and the bottom so it wouldn't put too much spacing in, but effectively would grind out from the printer, [makes sound of grinding printer] one line of fancy math and then would go in saying, okay, let's take the next line's worth and do all this processing and display it on the screen,' and then be grinding out, on the printer, and until 'we seem to be on the bottom of the page. Let's go on to the next page.' And it was kind of magical.
• There was one day I ... It sounds like I'm teasing Caryn, but she was a few minutes late for her class. I was working on a computer program and she just put the VersaBraille on the floor and said, 'the checkers call at M 1,' and ran out of the room. I thought oh gosh, darn it, because I was in the middle of programming so I had to kind of save all my work, write notes about exactly what I was doing, reboot the program--the math software--get all this done, run the translator, get the data over, and print out the pages. And it took about three or four minutes per page. So, doing even three pages, that's twelve minutes.
• Then I had three pages--I'd run to the duplication Department. I said, this is a rush job for Professor Navy at the Mathematics Department. She needs 25 copies, and I would take the [copies] ... and [it's] halfway into the class, Caryn's of course a few minutes late for her class, but I would knock on the door and I would say very politely, Professor Navy, 'your handouts are ready.'
• All: {Laughter.}
• David: That was a slice of real life. That's what our life was like in those days. That really did happen.
• Caryn: It's embarrassing.
• David: It's a glorious story, too. It's so great showing ... And these other professors would be really jealous of the typographical qualities of this. Can you set us up with some of this software, too? Well, you have to know the braille math code to get anything ...
• Tony: So, at this stage of the game, was there any hard copy embossing involved in the process yet, or was it strictly VersaBraille, Apple ...?
• David: We had a Braille embosser. We had a braille embosser during that time period because at one time we were able to buy or lease, or whatever--for the price of one dollar--one obsolete, MIT Braille embosser. It was an enormous machine, about the size of two refrigerators bolted together. Or maybe one refrigerator; it was just this huge thing. It took a U-Haul trailer to take [it] from the Boston area to Pennsylvania and I did that just after I learned how to drive. It was a little nerve wracking, taking this trailer, with this enormous thing. It was like a soda machine in the back. I had to disassemble it and carefully label all these wires and parts to haul it up the stairs and reassemble it.
• It sort of worked. It ... added an extra space all over the place. It basically sounded like a machine gun when it was on.
• But, a little bit after that, the Cranmer Brailler came out, which was such a wonderful innovation in comparison.
• Tony: Now, Duxbury was in existence already?
• David: Right.
• Tony: David, you knew about that?
• David: Yes. At the time that I was starting to sell products, they specialized in high-value transactions to agencies for the blind that had like a mini computer and set up their translator or whatever. So that groups such as the Associated Services for the Blind in Philadelphia or the CNIB could set up kind of a more expensive work station to do braille, but certainly this kind of approach was not feasible for an individual school or junior high school, or high school.
• So, I didn't have to go around saying, a computer could be used to translate braille. That was well established by Duxbury. But what I did was turn it into a commodity. At that point, you couldn't just say, 'I'd like three of them and hold the mayo and put it on rye,' and have some boxes arrive with a manual and ready to go. So, you could just get your own Apple II computer, get it set up and be operational as well. A kind of sneaky aspect of my operation is I systematically described how an Apple computer could be hooked up to just about anything I could get my hands on and describe adequately.
• So, there was a small cadre of individuals, many of them blind, who would get a consulting gig to fly into a place, stay in a motel for a couple days and just bring along a couple of cables and wires and get a embosser set up, configure the embosser--things that we would consider a bit of a nuisance. You'd make one or two tech calls to get it going, but you certainly wouldn't imagine paying someone a thousand dollars for the plane ticket, the motel, the meals and have them show up and just, 'oh, yeah, this one needs a straight-through cable,' punch a few buttons on the embosser to get it set for a 9600 Baud.
• But there are people who got a bit of their money doing that and were largely cut out of the game by me. Schools were delighted that they didn't have to fly anybody in to get their embossers hooked up. I ended up working a deal where I had sold Cranmer Braillers, that were made by Maryland Computer Systems. And there was a period of time when one-half of all the output of Cranmer Braillers was run through Raised Dot.
• It was a point of amazement that I was out-selling all these individual salesmen just sitting in one location, right on the phone. And there were reasons for it. One was I got a lot of phone calls having to do with the Cranmer Brailler and then coming up with my own little disk, called the Cranmer Interface Disk, and what it would do is display certain patterns on the screen....
• Basically I was a little frustrated because a lot of people would only pay once they got things set up, and it would delay setting up. So this thing ... it would process in like an hour. It was basically a tutorial on the screen. It would say, 'okay, type the following. ... 'Gee, your Cranmer was correctly interfaced.' Because it would absorb characters from the Cranmer. The software on the Apple was watching the Cranmer, judging whether or not it was interfaced correctly and giving people feedback. And following the instructions on there, you'd have to be pretty stupid not to get at least a couple sentences out on your embosser. You would then sign off on the purchase order and I would get paid faster. So, the need for cash flow often caused a little bit of inventiveness.
• Tony: Did you interact with Tim Cranmer at that point?
• David: Not so much. ... At conventions and things like that. Let me just hold this line of thought to talk about examples of two technical things that Caryn did which were really crucial to things, just to show that even at the earlier points, she was right there all along watching what I was doing and assisting me.
• In the opening days of working with the VersaBraille, I was vexed by a technical problem which was that when I attempted to send data from the Apple computer to the VersaBraille--even though a VersaBraille could absorb one thousand characters into each of its little, mini buffers as it laid out on the tape. After character 904, getting from the Apple, it would say, 'okay, that's too much data, I need to shift to my next page.' If somebody wanted 920 characters on one page, they couldn't do it.
• There was this one other mode that you could send data in to. It sort of worked. The problem was that for each character the pins would crash. [Noises] whew-ew-ew-it sort of sounded like a rainstorm under an umbrella. It really felt like the VersaBraille was self-destructing, which it probably was.
• Caryn guided me to the use of a particular command, which effectively shut off the rainstorm effect, and in fact it would make a little flipper trying to display a transaction of every 256 characters. So roughly, every two or three times on a page you would hear kind of a fluttering on the VersaBraille. And it got to be kind of part of the reassurity (sic) of 'flutter, flutter, kajunk!' as it would make a page, 'flutter, flutter, flutter, kajunk.... And you could kind of--even if you knew which pages were full, which ones were empty, you could have this audio sense that all was well with the world because of it, but I certainly might have just smashed my head against the wall in total frustration at trying to do things. So, I was able to take material from the VersaBraille--be it full pages, empty pages or halfway pages. There were a certain amount of very simple pages on the Apple ... and then send it back to a new file on the VersaBraille, exactly reconstructing empty pages, full pages, halfway done pages as the user might have desired. I swear, I got so frustrated that I know I wouldn't have been able to do that without Caryn.
• The other was Caryn's help during her Bucknell years, as she was a professor, was strictly as a volunteer. But after three years at Bucknell we moved to Madison, Wisconsin again. Doing Raised Dot full time. The last year at Bucknell, Raised Dot kind of really, really developed. In fact, I believe there were $200,000 worth of invoices ran through Raised Dot Computing. The final six months that we were in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania (that would have been early '84) so that was kind of when things got popular. Everybody wanted it all at once.
• Tony: Did you have a staff at that point?
• David: One person, one person working. So in the spring of '84 me and the staff person, Cindy Peltier, traveled to Madison. We looked at different properties, and identified the Steel Workers' Union hall as the best possible site. Caryn and I made an offer on the building, which was accepted, so we had our own office building for the low, low price of $65,000, with 4,000 square feet of space--3,000 usable square feet.
• So the whole circus was moved to Madison, Wisconsin on a much more professional basis. We were an incorporated company and had more of a staff, and Caryn joined fulltime.
• Tony: Caryn, your contract with Bucknell was for three years and that was the end of it?
• Caryn: Actually, my original contract was for two years. Then it got renewed for a second two years. But David was feeling really isolated in the middle of nowhere in Pennsylvania. And I wasn't too in love with Bucknell. I think if I had my druthers, I'd probably have stayed another year and try to make a go of it in academia, but David really said, 'okay, I can't stay here anymore.' And once we decided to leave, and I was freed from academia I have to say I felt a lot better.
• David: It was really wearing on Caryn. It was basically kind of grinding her up. It was kind of a horrible thing to see, and so I kind of--for my own needs, and my perception of Caryn's needs ... , 'You can go back and point to this point in life and say, 'I am being aggressive and demanding, and kind of directing our lives.... Later on you can direct things, but right now we are going to do this.' So I kind of forced the issue. Whether it was a good idea or bad idea, I stand on trial for the consequence of that decision. But I basically said, 'you're miserably working day and night....'
• Part of the thing was I'm a bit of a chameleon in terms of my work habits. Caryn was working so hard that I was sort of like working a lot of extra hours just kind of following her daily path and I was working much less intensive than she was and people were acting as if I was working day and night. She was just beyond the pale.
• Caryn: I was spinning my wheels a lot.
• Tony: At the maximum, how many courses were you teaching?
• Caryn: I think three different courses, but there were two sections of one, making it four classes.
• Tony: Had you gotten involved with any research at Bucknell?
• Caryn: A bit, but not enough, really. I didn't publish any papers.
• Tony: When you made your break from academia, it was clean. There weren't any leftovers that you had to finish up on? A clean break.
• Caryn: No. That's right. I think a few months before the end of the school year, I said I was going to be leaving and they were able to hire somebody.
• David: One piece that's interesting--talking about research. Very soon after Caryn started working full time at Raised Dot, when we relocated to Madison, she did an original piece of research which was highly significant and had reverberated for a lot of things--at least to me--which indicated the value of Caryn, which was, she identified ( ... I just blew it off and ignored it), a serious bug within the Cranmer Brailler.
• Most of the work I had done--because of the way I was doing the page numbering I think I had.... The software I had up to that point could only do page numbering to the right hand side, but not text mixed in with it. So, since the bottom line was full, the bug wouldn't show up in most of the work I, myself, did because I was using the page numbering. But when other people were using the program, without page numbering, it would report, 'I'm getting this screwy format,' and I would kind of find one way or another of blowing it off, ignoring it or paying no attention to it. But Caryn started working at it, and at one point she said, I can mathematically prove there's a clinch here and I said, no, there's no clinch.
• I remember being so dismissive, or whatever, and by the time little lesson was over, I had my tail between my legs saying, 'oh my god, you're right.' And I do believe that on three separate occasions we tried to bring this to the attention of the makers of the Cranmer Brailler, but they kind of blew it off; they ignored it. And so we put in some software that effectively made sure that it would never, ever see form feed, that it would basically count how many ... when a form feed was attempted to be sent to it say, how many lines are we away from the bottom and it would spool out just enough carriage returns to fill out the line.
• So that, effectively, when you use our software as repaired from that point onward, this bug would not show up. Since our software was only going to be used with the Cranmer Brailler, there was no incentive by the manufacturer to change anything. We have since identified lots of little hiccups and glitches with any number of our embossers, and some of the fun of writing embossing software is just to make it happen so that you can get the braille you want without using all new things that could drive you crazy. But it was kind of interesting. Within two weeks that Caryn started work at Raised Dot, she found this glitch which, if we hadn't really fixed it properly, would have left a very black mark against the Cranmer and our software, because it was just before people were starting to cry bloody murder about stuff.
• Caryn: It came at a good point for me, because I was having a lot of mixed feelings about a pretty big career change. I remember when we were leaving Bucknell and stuff, and the phone call from my mother asking, 'what are you going to do for money?'
• All: {Laughter.}
• David: It's just like so much money. Of course, when I had $200,000, I didn't mention that overwhelmingly that was in Cranmer Embossers.... We only had a 15 percent margin on it. So the amount of money that stuck to me was relatively low. But, hey, we could afford a down payment on an office building. We could do a lot of things. There was a lot of money coming in at that time, and we were able to, at least on a personal level, find a place to live, and buy food and do all those other things without suffering.
• Caryn: Yeah, the other remark that always comes to mind about my feelings, about switching careers, was being at a convention--this was about a year later--is having somebody, who I think felt that she was being supportive and stuff in some kind of feminist way say, 'So, how does it feel being a PhD and working as a sales lady?'
• All: {Laughter.}
• Tony: And how did you take that ...?
• David: And you're inner child was crying, running to mama inside [Laughter].
• Tony: I would say that was brave of you, even though David insisted upon it.... That it was still brave of you to jump from one realm to another realm.
• Caryn: Yeah. I guess maybe inside I knew I wasn't real happy with what I was doing.
• Tony: And it might have been Bucknell and that environment .... We may have Bucknell to blame.
• Caryn: Yeah, I guess I did feel pretty isolated. Actually I had some good friends in the math department. When we were at Lewisburg we were very lucky that there was another half to the blind community of Lewisburg. Debbie Kent Stein.
• Tony: Yes.
• Caryn: [She] was living there at the time. In fact they had moved there just like a half year, a couple months before we did.
• David: Yeah. We did a lot of brunches together. They were so much fun. As a couple they were just so much fun. I so enjoyed hanging with them. It was a lot of fun.
• Tony: What made you decide to look to Madison to return to?
• David: One of the things that got me frustrated was when the print wheel on my daisy printer broke, I had to drive 45 minutes away to another town to get a replacement. If I wanted to do a mailing I might go to two stationery stores in town: The Campus Bookstore and--this little hole in the wall stationery store and clean them out of certain size envelopes and still be wanting. The business was growing to a point where it was just really not working so well from a small town. And we had connections in Madison. We had some good friends there who were willing to support and help us work there. In fact one, Jesse Kaysen, was just eager to work with us and help things.
• Tony: When did the "Raised Dot" Newsletter start?
• David: The foundation of that ... I was at some sort of seminar. I think it was run by the AAAS, and I think it was in Washington, DC. I can't remember where. They had a lot of people in a room talking about what they're trying to do and accomplish, and you just wanted to express your dreams or whatever.
• I sort of expressed something like wanting a better way of communicating with people. And this all pre-internet, the whole idea that people would hunger for information about different devices and products and things like that and not have instant gratification in one second.

End of Tape 2, Side A

David Holladay

Tape Two / Side B

Date June 14, 2003

• David (Cont'd): In those days if you wanted to know about stuff, where would you go?
• February 1982 was a particularly frustrating year. What made this month interesting was that up until that point the makers of the echo voice synthesizer, (this nice little card that really enabled a lot of blind applications to the Apple II) ran out of a particular speech chip, and they had to use a slightly different chip. And the consequences were that the software ran on the old chip sounded a little muffled or significantly degraded, but if you used a slightly different version of software, low and behold all went well.
• Apple II just released the Superserial card, which had greatly enhanced powers. The most common serial card at that time was called the California Computer Systems 7710 A Card, which you could set some switches for baud rate, serial port, etc., but the Superserial card was wonderful but it required more careful setups and cabling and whatever.
• The VersaBraille people had switched from the Model B VersaBraille to the Model C VersaBraille and there was one more issue.... I do believe it may have been the introduction of the Apple II E, moving away from the Apple II Plus. So these represented crucial changes. All the pieces that involved my software, I had every past customer calling about each and every or one of the issues.
• The phone traffic that month was just staggering and if I had a simple newsletter that could communicate to people like, 'Yes, we need to talk about this new chip, bla, bla, bla,' my life would be a lot easier, I wouldn't need to be on the phone so much. So that month forced the introduction of the newsletter and the ability to record and send out audiotapes as well as a printed newsletter. So that's how it all started. And the newsletter was very famous for trying to tackle a lot of topics, even trying to give reasonable reviews of competing products; and trying to give an overview of the whole field, and not just talk about narrow issues that might be related to my own products.
• Tony: Now one of the things, in reading some of the issues you sent me that you had to tackle on the business side of things, was the ... we'll call it the illegal copying of software. And I suspect that you were in the midst of a relatively new and growing phenomenon--the whole idea of copyright protection and protection of your income.
• David: Yeah. Well, in the sense, somebody was darn stupid to steal the disk because ultimately you needed the stream of updates and tech support. We gave away updates for free--pretty much. We hardly charged anything for anything once somebody bought the base product. Anybody would realize that you'd really be stupid to yourself if you didn't actually buy the product yourself. You would lose 90 percent of the value because you wouldn't have a voice in suggesting improvements, you couldn't get tech support. If you run into even the stupidest problems you're just stuck there. I think that some people are shortsighted that way.
• There were some issues that were addressed later on--of certain agencies just duplicating the software and passing it out to all their clients--and we dealt with that once ... What the heck, when the State of Florida was doing that. And so we found a particularly inexpensive way of dealing with this; it was kind of like dropping the H-Bomb. We contacted the attorney general in the state saying, 'we allege that the following department is copying software.' So that, effectively, the attorney general of that state ends up writing the Commission of Blindness, and has to go down all the chain of commands, all kinds of meetings and stuff like that. And everyone says, 'no, we're not doing, we're not doing it.' So we get a letter back from the Attorney General of the Sate of Florida saying, you made these allegations; the allegations are unproven. But the consequences in the agency are all these meetings and whatever, and everyone is just furious at us. Various people of the State of Florida came to me saying, we're never going to buy a single thing from you, you blankety, blankety, blankety, blank. How dare you say that? And I said, well, our understanding was there was some widespread pirating of our software and we felt we had to respond to that, and I'm sorry you feel that way.
• But when we talked to lawyers, the lawyers said, 'No, no, no, it's too complicated legally to sue an agency. What you want to do is sue an individual.' So we just thought we had a publication nightmare--to take a random individual and turn him into a poster boy. You couldn't conceive of the political utility of suing an individual blind person. So, the lawyer angle seemed to be a total dead-end. But for the cost of a single first-class stamp and a letter, that was drafted with the assistance of a lawyer, we could effectively put an end to software piracy by big departments. The ramifications ... people would say ... went around everyone saying, 'don't buy this software. The people are mean, awful and ghastly. But ultimately, it could be said that I was willing to stand up and tell the truth.
• Tony: Did you suffer a noticeable loss of sales?
• David: I have no idea whether we did or not. But on the other hand, we let it be known; we told the story to various other people.
• We had another interesting conflict with V-Tek Corporation that apparently bought one copy and they were just using it all over the place. And there was one day when we witnessed simultaneous demonstrations in two different cities involving one copy of [our] software. And we let it be known that that's not how one copy of software works. And the net result is we traded one of their embossers for eleven copies of the software, but we had some interesting sharp words with lawyers and whatever.
• Tony: That's a very close-knit group, the blindness technology group. Everybody knows everybody. Were there strained relations among technology vendors and manufacturers because of some of these things?
• David: I think people knew that it was not such a hot idea. I'll just mention one other thing. There are a lot of blind individuals who are just fanatic Raised Dot loyalists. My own kind of "out there" attitude, kind of--I won't say rock star mentality. It was kind of interesting. I think one blind person related to another person, 'if I find out that anyone's pirating the software, I'll bash their head in and piss on their brains, I think was the expression that was used.' This was not something I said, but was just like an experience out there in the world. And I thought to myself, 'now that's copy protection.'
• All: {Laughter.}
• Tony: You had groupies.
• David: Yeah. I didn't ... The moment that the groupies kind of came out, there was, at one point, a competing product in terms of software that on another computer that enhanced the role of VersaBraille. A Professor Newfeld, of Canada, came up with something called Versa-Text, and it was kind of ... run as a little toaster....
• Caryn: I think CPM.
• David: Yeah, a CPM computer, and it was just a sealed box, and the idea was the box plus the VersaBraille was a hyper VersaBraille. And for people totally VersaBraille oriented, it could do some nice things. There were some rumors that the software was not really free of bugs, so you kind of have to work with a lot of issues. And if you wanted to do speech or stuff with print or anything like that, it had no utility whatsoever. And at a certain point Telesensory said, 'okay, we're going to drop any interest in this BRAILLE-EDIT, Raised Dot thing and focus our attention on this Versa-Text thing.'
• At one of the conventions, there was this kind of meeting about Versa-Text versus Braille edit and after someone gave a presentation, I just stood up and said, 'my name is David Holladay and I work for Raised Dot Computing and there was this wild applause--like I hit the high-water mark, the rock star phenomenon. It was all down hill from there. At least for a brief moment, all this stuff was worth fighting over.
• All: {Laughter.}
• Tony: Your stardom. Well, there are record album sales records we can find to track your stardom through the years.
• David: Then we'd have one of these, 'But then all the cocaine and the groupies, and it was all down hill from there [laughter].
• Tony: Caryn, you worked at Bucknell for three years?
• Caryn: Right.
• Tony: And very few blind people have worked as professors of mathematics in a university setting. I'd like to hear some of your experiences--at Bucknell from preparation, to the classroom itself, ... everything.
• Caryn: I remember when I was about to start teaching at Bucknell, whenever I start something new, I tend to get really afraid, being nervous about it. Although I had taught as a Teaching Assistant at The University of Wisconsin for four of my six years there. I actually enjoyed that, but somehow being fully responsible for all the teaching felt a little more scary. I guess my first semester teaching ... at Bucknell, I think I was teaching Calculus I and Calculus III and there was one other.... No, I think I was just teaching Calculus; I think I taught logic later. Anyway, when, In the spring when David got the software working to be able to take stuff from the VersaBraille and make print, that was a great security blanket because I could make hand outs, even to make hand outs for the students to supplement, and that made me feel a lot better about the teaching.
• I remember, the first day in the class that first semester, some of the students came to the class and switched to other classes on the first day.
• Tony: Ouch.
• Caryn: I know that happens to other people to, but it doesn't feel very good. Bucknell has a reputation for having a lot of spoiled, rich-kid students.
• Tony: Not like MIT.
• All: {Laughter.}
• Caryn: A different kind of spoiled rich kid.
• Tony: MIT had some of the smarts to back up some of their spoiledness, not to put down Bucknell.
• Caryn: I think I miss some of the camaraderie that I felt as a grad student; like, all the grad students working together like for things like studying for qualifiers, or if there were six TAs working for one professor, you know, we would all put our heads together, do fun things, and read together. So, just being on my own felt kind of difficult. And even the textbook we were using for calculus, you couldn't choose your own textbook, Bucknell had one textbook that was used for calculus. So it wasn't available in braille, so I was using my opticon to access the textbook. Eventually, I got some of it brailed ... I guess most of it brailed by a volunteer transcriber. But it was taking a lot of time to even use the textbook that my class was using. I hated the textbook anyway. I preferred some other calculus textbook. That's another reason why I like to do a lot of things out.
• Some of the mechanics were really difficult. I did write on the blackboard--I had done that as a TA as well. Both from having been sited and from using OPTACOn to read math a lot, I felt pretty comfortable writing on the blackboard. The main difficulty was keeping straight lines and, ... when I was a TA I talked with some of the physical plant workers in Madison, at U.W. who made a blackboard guide for me. It was a fairly light metal frame with strings across--maybe like five or six strings across for lines. So, I used those as guides. And then when I was finished with one panel of the blackboard, the whole frame would slide easily over to the next panel.
• When I was first trying to be a TA--when I started my second year of grad school. Toward the end of my first year I had said that I was interested in being a TA, and people were a little skeptical. I got to do a sample lesson, and in my sample lesson I used some sort of like clothes dryer as a blackboard guide. And from that came the more official thing that the physical plant workers made for me. And I brought that blackboard guide with me to ... Bucknell.
• David: There's also a legend associated with that particular sample. Caryn was doing a particular formula in calculus that makes certain operations a lot more efficient. So, when Caryn was finished, to her great embarrassment, she found that the two answers were off by a factor of 2. I wasn't there, but the tale, that I understand is, Caryn stood back from the blackboard a little bit, thought, realized what her problem was, exactly erased the defective parts, and replace [them] with the corrected parts. And at that point the committee that was judging whether Caryn would be an effective teacher, decided, 'okay, she can do this job. But meanwhile, Caryn's really embarrassed. 'I made a mistake, I can't believe I made a mistake.' But they're so impressed with her because, 'OK, from this point on, I erase and quickly fixed it.' 'Oh my god, they're going to think I'm such a dork.'
• All {Laughter.}
• Tony: Well, I like that. They saw that a teacher has to be able to think on her feet and be able to react mechanically.
• David: And you knew where everything was on the board.
• Caryn: Yes.
• Tony: You actually showed them two things at the same time.
• Caryn: Yeah.
• Tony: Yeah. That's great. It does have the same ring to it as slaving through the pieces. I mean, you use very old fashion technological theory to be able to write on the blackboard. In the midst of all these complex calculus equations is a mechanical scriptwriter. {Laughter.} Did your colleagues interact with each other very much, and did you get to interact with them?
• Caryn: Yeah, just to some extent, especially as time went by.... There was no real formal system for interacting, as there had been when I was a grad student. But to some extent we would talk to each other, informally, and what stuff are you doing in your class? The classroom where I did most of my teaching was right next door to the office for probably my best friend in the math department--a woman named Pam Gorkin. She would occasionally give me some feedback and made me feel good about my teaching. That really helped a lot.
• Tony: Calculus is no easy thing to teach to begin with, and constant use of symbols and all that.... How is teaching logic? It sounds to be a different type of teaching.
• Caryn: Yeah. And I don't think I did a very good job of it because I was developing the course as I went along and I felt myself sort of floundering. It was like an advanced level course for--there were maybe a couple of juniors and seniors in the class. I think I could have done a better job if I had done it again.
• Tony: You only got to teach it the one time?
• Caryn: Yeah. I think I only taught it the one time.
• Tony: That's what teachers always say. Pity the student that gets you the first time you teach a course, right?
• Caryn: Hum um.
• Tony: And dealing with exams, did you give them homework that they had to hand in every class? Did you have a lot of paperwork to do?
• Caryn: A fair amount of paperwork. Maybe not every class, but yeah, they did have things to turn in. David did some of the grading for me. I also worked some with a student aide that Bucknell did pay for. For grading. In a lot of ways, it was easier to work with David. I remember this one paper grader who was very strident in her ideas and had a hard time accepting that I was the boss. Sometimes David had a hard day. No, he was a lot easier to deal with than the paper grader as I remember. Paper grading was not one of my favorite things that I had to do.
• Tony: You eventually became editor of the newsletter.
• Caryn: Yeah. When we moved to Madison, I guess Jessie became the editor--Jesse Kaysen. And then, when she left, I became the newsletter editor. That was like a year or two before it finally died.
• Tony: That was way into the '90's. If I remember correctly....
• Caryn: ... sometime about 1989 or '90.
• Tony: Around then?
• Caryn: Yeah. I think once we became parents, it became really hard to do the newsletter.
• David: It originally was sort of an evening and weekend--sort of a hobby that was attached to the business. It was impossible to write articles and deal with them only during those off hours when there are children around. That plus the internet killed off the newsletter.
• Tony: I wanted to ask you, David, where did you learn how to program?
• David: I got a little bit of programming in college, and I had an interest in programming, and I learned the hard way--brute force with Mohr Labs Computing. By the way, the search for Mohr Labs computing. By the way, if you do a Google search for Mohr labs, there's not a trace left. That august institution is just completely ... invisible. It made a crude 6502 computer around the same time the Apple II was coming out. They tried to do things, it would just run certain laboratory automation so their certain biochemical experiments could be automated. I think they made seven or nine computers before the firm completely died leaving all the relatives and the founders deeply in debt and me chagrined--at the position I was in.
• Tony: Did you take any programming courses anywhere along the way?
• David: Yeah. I took one or two programming courses. I'm trying to remember....
• Caryn: You took 6051 at MIT.
• David: Yeah. The classic programming in the 360 assembly language. By a legendary professor, Donovan. He was full of tales of flying into France overnight, solving the world's computer problems and flying off somewhere else. That was quite entertaining.
• Tony: What was your relationship, if at all, with Joe Sullivan? This would be in the early days I'm talking about.
• David: Yeah. Just friendly, cordial. ... Joe Sullivan is the sweetest man in the entire world, so I didn't have a devil--figure to throw a dart at--at a dartboard. There would be times when you would be very proud of a particular competitive act, you know, getting a particular sale, or whatever you were both striving for. I was just reminiscing at work about the peculiar position of Australia during the Apple II days. There were a huge number of Apple II clones in the Far East that were never allowed in the United States. Names like the orange computer, the pineapple computer--very, very popular in Australia because they were so cheap. So there were a lot of talking Apple II clones in Australia.
• We sold like 90 to 100 copies of our Apple II software in Australia and then when we switched to PC, we didn't focus on marketing in Australia. By the time we thought, let's really rev up marketing in Australia we only made a tiny number of Megadot sales there. Duxbury totally had swooped down and gotten every conceivable sale there, except for one school in the outback. It was, 'how the heck do they do that?' How could they sweep Australia so effectively? It was like, 'We don't know anything about it.' Until recently, no one had any memory of it.
• I just wanted to throw in a point to the earlier times. In terms of the place and function of Raised Dot, what it was all about and what those early years really mean. One part of it is that the Raised Dot software offered a kind of laboratory for an entire cadre of computer people. I mean, I could list the names; some of them would be known, some of them really cut their teeth on the Apple II computer and our software.
• And these people literally became trainers, inventors of equipment. A number of people used the Apple II software and moved on.... Basically, allowed them to really get some real worked done. It wasn't a temporary thing. Some people really did something. The documentation's accessible. They would say, 'we need this, this and that,' and it would happen. And so there was a loyalty and whatever. And then they marched on to conquer the world.
• Tony: I would love it if you would name names.
• David: Sandy Ruconich. Caryn, help me out on this.
• Caryn: Ted Blazer, Nick Dodson, Al Gazagian, Sue Melrose.
• David: Allen Holtz, Harvey Lauer, of course.
• Caryn: Noel Runyan, Olga Espinola.
• David: Many of these people became directors, programmers, or trainers or whatever. While they were no longer directly using Apple II equipment, the experience from that, and the expectations from that helped drive further development.
• In the late 80's, I saw the result of a survey someone had done. The early PC years were very, very frustrating because the access technology was so poor. There was nothing like JAWS. I mean it was really, really rough doing stuff, and so lots of people were being trained at stuff and failing. And one person did a survey of successful people using the PC, and one thing they all had in common is that they all had an Apple at home. And overwhelmingly they were using my software.
• So it was basically, in the early years of the PC, a jumping off point, a point of really getting all the computer concepts down pat, and a way of occasionally getting work done that otherwise couldn't be done anywhere else. And I suppose, kind of a footnote to that, during those years, I remember working any number of really exotic, weird projects, like: somebody had a book written on a Radio Shack laptop.
• Tony: One of those TSR ...
• David: Yeah. No, no. Not the TSR computer. It was kind of a funky laptop. It was very popular because it was a very small portable, basically the size of a big notebook computer that in the late 80's was considered an electronic miracle. It had a port that could run at 300 baud, so people could write little quick stories and plug into a modem and send them to their ... I'm trying to remember what these things were called. Anyway, someone had a disk in it and was able to print it to an Apple II computer, run it through its various things and later to a PC. So they were able to get it on to a PC disk using this elaborate chain.
• Another time, somebody had something else, some weird Apple format that I was able to convert into a proDOS text file. BEX software was able to read pro DOS text files and then I could get it into the type setting software as required to get the article printed out. So, various times I was able to "work miracles" for people getting weird data formats, and I'd run them with the Apple and do all this global replacements that the software could do so easily. So, I could imagine for some of the more skilled adherents out there, of the religion of Raised Dot, they're able to pull some stunts that people say, 'no, there's no way you could do X, Y, Z,' and yes you can grab the data from this and perform these various manipulations and then get it in some other format.
• Caryn: I just want to mention that, for me, I think I was pretty slow at getting into the PC. I tried Ron Hutchinson's software. But I didn't really feel comfortable on the PC until I started using Flipper, which you might or might not be familiar with
• David: It was kind of a weird program coming out of nowhere that had ...
• Caryn: From Steve Smith, a professor at Berkley.
• Tony: That was Berkley Systems.
• Caryn: No, no. He was at U C Berkley. In the electrical engineering department.
• Tony: Okay.
• David: His name for the company is Omnicron.
• Tony: This is PC, the DOS days. We haven't gotten to PC windows. I'm not sure this is the proper question. But the question is, from braille edit to BEX, to Megadots? Is that a proper question?
• David: Yeah. There's also something called Hotdots in between.
• Tony: Hotdots. Okay
• David: on the PC.
• Tony: Can you summarize, for the listener, that sequence--what the changes were, what some of the differences were. At least what it was like, going through that whole process, evolving the software?
• David: Well the BEX software was, in many ways, a total rewrite of the BRAILLE-EDIT. And then one of the innovations was the different level of software, so you could say, 'I'm at the learner level, the user level, the master level,' and thorough documentation: there was a manual for the learner level, the user level and the master level, which effectively said, these are things we add on from the previous level. It didn't start from the beginning all over again.
• There was massive documentation available in braille, print and audiotapes. And so it was truly a product, which could be used very heavily in schools as a kind of total laboratory for the computing and word processing needs of someone. It just really, really covered things very thoroughly. It was very popular in the schools. One of the innovations of BEX was that it had a large chunk of software, always in memory, that handled a lot of input/output routines that.... It was playing a lot of little sneaky, dirty tricks that in doing things with the Apple II was never intended to do.
• One of the ways the Apple II works is that you're only supposed to output to one device at a time. So any time you try to output a character, my little resident software says, 'Oh, we need output; let's look at our list. Gee, according to this, we're supposed to send to the screen, we're supposed to send to voice, we're supposed to send to VersaBraille, we're supposed to send to a printer.' And, effectively run four devices simultaneously if that was part of the configuration process.
• It was just so flexible, so nifty; you could just set up little tables. But of course it was fundamental while it was on Apple II, and when the PC revolution came, it just had no more place anymore. Hotdots was a quick and dirty product that just got the braille out, relatively easy for a number of products. Megadots was designed as a kind of ... not as a kind of the full environment the way in which BEX did because BEX was kind of this rich text editor/voice response/word processing/braille environment. It kind of did everything. It was your Swiss army knife. Megadots was more focused on okay, let's make braille, so we'll have an environment that allow editing for the purposes of making braille. We're not trying to knock Word off the #1 position. That's not our objective here.
• And we're assuming some other software is going to do all the work of the speech output, so we're not going to be involved. Like the Echo did that on the Apple, we would be engaged in things that effectively kind of laid some groundwork and helped out the Echo. We didn't get involved in that part of it at all. So it was a much more focused product.
• One thing that the Braille-Edit/BEX family did was, say, 'let's treat data, your word processing file, as a big bag of characters; we don't care what they are.' If somebody wants to make a file of eighty Control Z's in a row, fine, let them make a bunch of Control characters and if someone wants to say, I want to clip part from here to here and put it over here, fine, let's do it. But if you have this enormous bag of characters, then you have to kind of know what exactly your doing at every point. You're effectively, in some sense, programming your characters, ... direct entry of these complicated commands, formatting commands. It works fine to get certain things done, but it took a certain toll on learning.
• Megadots was designed as a product that ... it would internalize lots of the rules of braille and just say, okay, this is the table of contents and you would say, hum. But we're in textbook format with multiple layers, so we're going to do indent here, then run over here and not put any text on the same line where the page number is. We'll handle all the rules, so that, as much as possible, we separated wherever the computer would automate something, and handle something automatically. We did that so that people would not have to know the braille rules.
• As an example the technical staff at Raised Dot, which consists of Caryn Navy, Aaron Leventhal, and myself, realized that there were seven different ways in which footnotes showed up in braille. In textbook format, where there are two footnotes in the same paragraph or one in literary format where there was longer than six or seven words, less than seven words and when they were doing footnotes at the end of the chapter or not. There were, effectively, seven different cases. And so, what we did was set up so you'd have one way of doing data entry. This is the way you do footnotes in Megadots, and then, if you said literary format, the program counted the words. 'oh, gee, we have six words, that's less than seven, we'll do fill in the blank.' 'Oh, we have more than seven words, we'll do whatever.' The competing product, Duxbury, would tend to assume the user was well versed at things. So that it said, effectively, 'if you have a literary format and you have more than seven words, then you give the following commands to be indent this or number that ... ' and you'd have to know all that. So Megadots is designed to internalize all those rules. Of course there are a lot of other things besides that, because we are clever people and couldn't stop throwing things in.
• Tony: {Laughter.} Like what?
• David: Like very clever global replace, like the ability to import huge numbers of files. I got a phone call from somebody at one point saying, they could set up web pages for us for what, I forget, $12,000 ... it was just a huge sum of money. They would set up a web page for Raised Dot Computing. And in the space of a couple days I set it up so that Megadots could export very serviceable HTML pages, you know, setting up photographs and all this other stuff, so BEX, no Megadots became my primary, preferred way of making HTML pages. I've made lots and lots of web sites and I would type all the text in Megadots and sometimes import other pages grab various elements, and restructure things and so it was my favorite way of generating HTML.
• Tony: So this software that is essentially Braille-based software, you found utility in things that other people just used visual-based software for?
• David: Right. Exactly.
• Tony: Fascinating. Very functional. That's a Hallmark of everything you have done is to make it as friendly for the user, who doesn't know a whole lot about computing, as you could have possibly have made it.
• David: Right. Kind of like.... One way of thinking about the Raised Dot ethos is to look at a particular piece of hardware.... How can we just get the most horsepower--software doing the most it possibly can with just a limited amount of hardware, and occasionally doing things that blew people's minds. I mean, I have to say, everyone told me, you could not ever make graphic mathematics out of an Apple II computer from Nemeth code. It was just an impossible project; there's no hope of it. You can do it. You have to think about it. Just think about it ahead of time, and just be a little creative and inventive.
• Tony: Were you influenced in the development of the Raised Dot ethos? Was there some sort of a sub-movement going on that you somehow became aware of, that user friendliness was becoming the name of the game? Or was it more that there wasn't any of that and you were reacting to the lack of user friendliness out there.
• David: It's a complicated story. Certainly, very early on I noticed a particular pattern of early purchases. Blind individuals would call me in the early days as many as six times asking, does your software do this or does your software do that? And I would spend a lot of time answering questions and occasionally making notes to myself of what people really wanted to do. And after the sale, they would also hound me for improvements or whatever, and every once in a while, out of the blue, would come a purchase order from a school. And I would just fill the purchase order.
• I would not know why the purchase order came, who made the recommendation; I would not hear from the customer again as often as not. It was just sort of like this magic little ticket for more dollars for sending some software. And I found that, clearly, the reason I was getting those purchase orders, because I was being pressed and hounded by blind individuals. But if I just served the blind individuals themselves, I would never have the revenue to support it. So it was this kind of grand and glorious "make everybody happy," make the schools, get the revenue, cash the checks, make the blind individuals happy so they wouldn't bleeping call me in the middle of the night with gosh darn questions so much. So I kind of responded to all the pressure.
• Later on I would read articles describing that good software had flow. In other words you would have the sense of immersion, which would be kind of like, in your mind, of being one with it. You would be so involved with doing that. I really liked that. We would develop a style where especially Megadots, we actually minimize the number of keystrokes to do something. I would read articles saying this was a really, really good approach to things. There would also be things that good software would be something which would fit the needs of beginners and advanced users simultaneously, because master users could just go around showing beginners how to get started with this. And that would kind of enhance the reputation of master users and obviously we need the revenue from the beginning users. And others would say, a certain amount of program ability within the software, so you could change the software was useful. And certainly BEX allowed ... You could directly make access to the grade II tables. We actually document how the grade II tables were structured, which was unheard of. Everyone treated their braille tables as if they were a horrible dark secret. So we would go out of our way in sections of the manual, here's how you modify the tables--which horrified other vendors.
• You could set up these global replace chapters and then you could also, in BEX at least, set up these fancy macros. You would describe the keystrokes to do a very complicated operation. You could do fabulous, complex things--take a bunch of data from another source, perform all kinds of unusual modifications, manipulations, searches and replacements and clipboardings, and add this thing on the top, and move this thing to the bottom and then explore the ... following way. You could even run it in Braille with ways in which you've modified--if you want the word, philosophy, in should come out as p-h-i-l in your braille. Gosh, you could do it; you could add your own rules to it, to some limited extent, and have them integrated within the braille tables themselves and not ... in somebody's terminal. You wouldn't have to worry about the capitalization or punctuation, the effects of just doing a raw global replace, but to do it within the framework of the translation action itself.
• So there's a lot of advanced stuff for the advanced user and we also make the beginner user happy. So, if that had that kind of duality, it was real important.

END OF TAPE TWO

Tape Three / Side A

Date June 14, 2003

• Tony: In this day and age of protectiveness that companies have for their software, there is a group out there--especially the group that hovers around the Linux software. They talk about open source software and, essentially, some of the concepts you've been describing really pre stage this debate. You had elected early on to allow people to actually mess around inside the software a little bit to customize it--if they could, on their own, some of the functionality of the software.
• David: Yes, that's correct. But it was pretty much limited to the Braille translation tables. Ultimately, the Apple Soft files where unprotected as well, but the underlying assembly language which did a lot of the horsepower in effect, was...If you looked at the code for BEX, the Apple Soft would say, call bla bla bla, call this, call that. It was like call assembly languages all over the place. That I really didn't document; I had a little code sheet. A couple people, I would send copies of my own code sheet as to what these calls actually consisted of, but I didn't actually even supply the source code for that.
• This is perhaps the wrong place to talk about it, but I have a CD that has a lot of my old stuff from Raised Dot on it, and the CD has a lot of material from other vendors which is just copyright material so perhaps the existence of the CDS would be denied if it were ever brought before me. But I can of course make a clean version that doesn't include all those good items.
• Tony: So, you did not send me that CD?
• David: No, I did send the CD, but the CD also contains all the source codes of BEX and all the assembly language source codes and whatever, and the notes that are necessary, at least for a programmer to understand what is going on. And it also includes the Apple II simulator and executable versions of stuff so you could actually run the BEX software and in see in effect how all these calls and things actually do work. All those things are on there; of course you have to know how to pull it all together and have the time and trouble ... to ... Sometimes when some guy is sitting in prison for six months, they could try and piece together some of the basic technology ... from the Raised Dot days. I've distributed that to a couple people and I'm sure [not] everybody's interested ... but in terms of archival history, hopefully at some point, a copy of that data will be archived somewhere so that future generations, should they want to say, 'okay, what was the core technology there?' Somebody could actually look at it, pull it apart and write a PC thesis on it.
• Tony: That would be great. What happened when windows came in? That upended everybody. I guess it must have had a rather good effect, or bad effect, on you.
• David: During a lot of that time period, we stuck slavishly to the Apple II having ignored the PC. Then it got interesting. In fact, there was a certain period of time when--during the initial introduction to windows ... Those were turbulent years where really advanced users were barely making headway with really effective use of stuff. It really was not an effective tool for junior high kids, high school kids. It was not the friendliest environment. It was sort of like asking somebody to simultaneously run a racecar and a jet engine--to run the applications program and this screen review program that is often as not gave only a limited view of what was going on. So you had to be very clever at reconstructing what was actually happening, and anticipating, to be able to produce even the simplest of documents printed out on your printer. So, during the time period the schools kind of cloned the Apple II, and in effect the Apple II got very popular because a lot of schools said, 'Ah, we've got all these old junkie Apple IIs; who wants them?' I said we do, and so there was a kind of second wind for Apple IIs at that time.
• Caryn: Which period are you talking about?
• David: Late '80's, kind of, around the first introduction of early windows for the PC.
• Tony: For the PC.
• Caryn: Okay. Okay.
• David: And at a certain point we had no choice but to work on the PC and develop software for the PC. I'm not trying to say we could hold back history forever, but there was kind of an interesting time period where we would go to conventions and 'You're still doing stuff on the Apple II. Gee, everybody, everybody, everybody is doing something on the PC. When are you going to do it?' When there was a real demand out there, we perceived there to be a need for someone to do something on the Apple II (at least we perceived there to be a need) for someone to do something on the Apple II to continue to support that. That's what we did. Whether it was a good decision or a bad decision, once again we stand on the bar of history.
• Caryn: Then we finally got Hotdots out there as a PC DOS program. And we had to go through the same kind of issue again when people wanted something for windows rather than DOS.
• Tony: There must have been an interesting moment there, I'm going to guess, when the Macintosh was introduced. To me, and maybe it's only me, there's an irony in that you started with apple computers and then here comes the Macintosh which, if I remember my history correctly, really was the first graphical user interface computer [with] widespread dissemination among the population. Did you pay much attention to the existence of the Macintosh when it first came out?
• David: I remember going to a computer store and seeing some of the first Macs, saying, 'That's kind of interesting.' Ultimately, the time I got grumpiest at the Macintosh was the moment when somebody at marketing at Apple said, 'enough of this Apple II stuff. We're just going to ignore the existence of any Apple II materials anywhere, whatsoever.' And so that their entire database of marketing references was gone. If you wanted information about Braille, it'll only tell you about a Braille translator that ran on the Macintosh and nothing else. I found that truly annoying and obnoxious. I don't resent Apple II for being innovators with graphical interface. I think graphical interfaces are a wonderful innovation and a fine thing even though, at various times, I've mocked various aspects of Apple II or Windows for being ridiculous or slavish. I'll give you an example of completely dumb moves by Apple that have been well documented. Apple's insane belief that the world begins with education, and if we have a product that's used in schools, we'll eventually take over the world. And it's like, no you have a product that's used in schools and nowhere else. You've 'ghetto-ized' yourself. And they'd would have like ... over half the marketing staff would be directed to the schools at various levels and they'd have these hopeless projects, trying to get colleges to adopt the Macintosh.
• So a huge amount of resources were lost in it. I would have to say that ... going back to being horrible, weird, bizarre accidents -- me blowing up my hand, Caryn going to a particular Tupperware party, ... me going to a computer club, me talking to somebody in the MIT lunchroom having huge effects on my life -- through a series of accidents, one, I learned the core of Apple II technology. We saw an Apple II and it was raring to go, and second, the Apple II had an amazingly long life, way beyond what reasonably could have been expected of it. That was just sheer, stupid luck. There was no way of knowing that this would be the machine that would have real staying power. It could have been destroyed by some other little gizmo coming out by the tidal waves of computers done in those days--just one more lucky accident. Four lucky accidents.
• Tony: How much work did it take to adjust to the graphical user interface? The Windows environment?
• David: In many ways we never had.... {Laughter.}. That's the dirty little secret (joking).
• All: {Laughter.}
• Caryn: That was the last nail in the coffin for Raised Dot/Braille Planet.
• David: But the Megadots software is a DOS product that lives very easily, its designed to slip in and out of the Windows interface, but at certain key points, because it does not live within Windows, doesn't really work very well. At certain points the software will actually execute Windows software and then come back from that, being in a DOS environment.
• So it's able to once again pull these dirty little tricks that are highly mysterious and interesting. Of course, one of the symptoms in doing that is you lose mouse function. You're not supposed to ever run Windows from a DOS environment, even though we're able to do so. The DOS mouse gets lost; it's just sort of on the trip into Windows. And it's one of the continuing bugs. I understand why my mouse would find any imported file, and of course it had to run Windows software to run that import and then you'd lose your mouse functionality within Megadots. You say, well, save the file, exit Megadots, rerun and you're mouse will be there. Just batch your imports.
• Tony: So how difficult was it for you to make the decision to throw your lot with Duxbury, after all the years, the competition and changes ...? How hard a decision was that?
• David: Well, I have deep commitments to Braille and I said, 'okay, this is the way the mission continues because they had a commitment to continue the Megadots product line.' Other than that, I consider Caryn working and me kind of spending half time answering Megadots support calls and trying to continue to ship the product. Any other variation didn't seem to be too hot. They promised to pay off the debts that were left over from Braille Planet, which seemed like a good idea, because I didn't really want to undertake those myself. And so it seemed like a really good deal, both ... the customer-base, despite the initial shock found that everything was pretty much intact as far as they were concerned.
• Caryn: We've done a few updates since being in Duxbury land.
• David: Yeah. I won't say that ... Megadots is now available on a CD-ROM, which is an innovation that only happened under Duxbury.... So there have been continuing innovations. Some things may seem very small and minor, but certain long standing glitches have been identified and fixed. The latest version of the DAISY file format makes use of access characters with something called UTF 8 file format which are ways of having coding, unicode, sixteen bit data in an eight bit environment. And I only found out about it at the last minute. I cooked up some code, which I don't think is yet still in a shippable product right now, but it's at least sitting on my hard drive with the ability to import these unusual character strings. So, I run into a file and say, 'gee, we need to fix this,' and nobody has a problem with me just sort of grabbing a little bit of time, here and there to make little improvements.
• Tony: Throughout this wonderful story, I'm continually impressed how reactive to the market you've been. The question I asked earlier about how did you decide which directions to go in, essentially boils down to that continual monitoring of what the market wants out there, which seems to be the winning formula--at least in a capitalistic society.
• David: Yeah. In the early days in was kind of fun, because monitoring the market ... just the market calling me up at all hours of the day and night demanding certain things. It was kinda hard. I would kind of leave for Nova Scotia to get away. The market was chasing me pretty soundly. Nowadays they're a little more subtle about things. They'll just make purchasing decisions and just not tell you so much. Your project has not been blocked because of x, y or z, but ...
• Tony: Now, the role of competitive products in this. When you were first starting out, ... the competition was sparse. Well, if that's a correct opening, is the competitive environment different now?
• David: The whole landscape has changed. Everything is different. I suppose we should say that one of the reasons why we're eager to work at Duxbury is, the foundations are being laid for a product which would have the very best of Megadots, the very best of DBT, and a whole bunch of stuff that customers can only dream of in one product platform. (Joking) While it seems like--at the rate we're going, it maybe decades away before we start going to beta testing, I don't care. I like the fact that I'm working for a future foundation. That when that foundation comes up I know that that will be the basic building block for making Braille deep into the century. And the fact that I'm a part of that, to me is a great privilege. I know that those are kind of well worn words but I can't imagine a better place to be for somebody who's really interested in Braille than working at Duxbury. Even though it may seem like, 'gee, these guys never come up with something.' And that's because, when we start chewing on something, we chew on it thoroughly before we move on to the next thing. And, yes, there are some really good plans. I suppose, thinking about the future gives me a lot of excitement.
• Tony: Do you observe the trend to be toward a larger company, as opposed to a very tiny company, let's say like Raised Dot Computing was, verses let's say Duxbury is? You see some of the other consolidations in blindness assistive technology. Do you see that as a sign of the times? The enlarging of companies?
• David: Well, at its height, Raised Dot had nine employees. Right now Duxbury has fifteen employees or so. Not that far apart. Granted that nine employee watermark was a relatively short number of months before we had to move downwards. In terms of scale, I would say consolidation and changes are happening all over the place.
• Let me just relate an anecdote. I love telling this story, and it was probably pretty meaningless, but I attended the ACB Conference in 1984 and there were myself, Bill Grimm, and one, possibly two other firms displaying small computer applications and then a couple larger firms that hadn't really done anything specifically with smaller computers, but doing things with technology (Telesensory, etc., Kurzweil) displaying their wares. I went to the ACB in '84 because it was in Pennsylvania and it was just weeks before we moved to Madison, Wisconsin.
• Caryn: I think that the first one that you mentioned was actually earlier.
• David: Oh, I'm sorry. That would be, that was '82....
• Caryn: '83, whatever.
• David: Yeah. I'm sorry. '83 was the one that had a small number. Then the '84 conference--it was just one year later--was a shock because there were literally dozens, I mean dozens of different firms that might be regarded as small mom and pop operations, doing stuff. Of course I had quite a bit to show off, we had a Teehl embosser hidden in our hotel room. We were just reaming out materials, we were doing a daily newspaper there. But it was just a shock seeing how many other firms were doing stuff, and my sense was there were a lot of people who had a blind sister, spouse, coworker and they solved technical problems with one individual and then said, 'Wow, just by duplicating this disk, making a few more bits of hardware, I've got myself a small business.' And they showed up at this convention and they looked at each other and go, 'Oh my gosh!'
• And the next conference I went to was the '85 conference and it was back to Telesensory and Kurzweil and a few other big companies. There was a larger number than back in '83, but it seemed like this huge mushroom cloud of small firms doing technology for the blind which just came in within one year. It was like somebody seeded the spores all over the place. And so something about Raised Dot that could be said if I hadn't started when I did, then I might have gotten lost in the whole shuffle. Part of the historical accident of Raised Dot was I got in the game a little bit earlier than some of those other people and had more staying power. I've not seen any articles or any reference to that unusual phenomenon, so to say there's been consolidations now, there have been consolidations all over the place.
• Tony: It will be within the realm of some historian of technology to figure this out.
• Caryn: And it's still possible for small companies to come up out of the woodwork, like Dancing Dots, that will do some significant things.
• Tony: When you reflect on the Louis Braille story, it has some poignancy to it. Dancing Dots with musical Braille software.
• All: Yes. Yes. {Laughter.}
• David: And again, we were endlessly asked, when are you going to do something for music, and we just didn't have the time or the expertise to do it. If we had the inclination and energy and were able to have done Braille music, things built into our software, Dancing Dots would never had occurred.
• Tony: Is there anything that you would have loved to--I mean really, like right now, you could easily say, 'I would have loved to have done this thing', but just never got around to it? ... In the assistive technology realm?
• David: Oh, lots of things. I mean knowing what I know about the general art of technology, that kind of field intelligence would have been invaluable to go back in time and make any number of adjustments and whatever.... It would have been great if I could have studied the assembly language and other things required to have come up with a flipper very early in the game. If I had done something like that very, very early, and had been ready with the PC from the get go ... if I had known how difficult getting any kind of access with the DOS PC, it would have been great to have come out with what would probably be the first real practical product to do stuff. Because one of the things that made people so mad about Omnicron was that the proprietors of that company treated it as a hobby and not as a professional business. And there are all kinds of tales that sound like.... It's almost unbelievable how their customers were just ignored or shabbily treated because, at a certain point, they didn't feel like playing company. Sort of like, 'Let's go to the movies tonight, or let's play company, or let's play house now.' That could be endlessly frustrating. You need something ... I've had people telling me (this isn't something that [I mean to] sound so hurtful) that they were promised something, red label, overnight, and it didn't show up. 'Oh I'll send it out right now,' and it didn't show up. How many times are you going to get on the phone with someone, 'don't worry, I'm sending it red label,' and it not show up. ... 'Enough of this.'
• So, if we, as a professional company, could have mastered this technology and deployed it earlier than any one else, we would have become, kind of, effectively, the JAWS. ... I mean we could have gotten huge revenue.... I mean, obviously, if you know where the gold mines are ahead of time, it's a lot better than bashing your head against the wall with the 20th dry hole.
• Caryn: One thing that we actually hoped to do, and it never got finished with, was something like the Braille nemeth code to ink print display and print out software that we had on the Apple. That would have been sweet.
• Tony: One of the earliest things that you started with was getting mathematics to print and the nemeth code, probably an equal challenge, and you got it part way.
• Caryn: Yeah, we did it on the Apple, but we never got it working on the PC where it would of had a much bigger potential market, and it would have helped a lot more people.
• Tony: Well, you're both so relatively young in your careers and you're with a company that seems like there would be some opportunities for growth there. So in addition to the projects you know about, do you have a secret project lurking in your mind that, if somebody were to listen to this tape ten years from now, they'll say, 'Ah, they were thinking about that in 2003, and here it is in 2013 and they did it'? Would there be something you'd like to tell us about that would be a secret that we'll probably all know about it, but may or may not come to pass?
• David: I think I have stated as often as not, in various places that the one technology I'd love to see is the technology where you can take a page, put it in an OCR device, have it scanned and have it produced in Braille, including technical ... mathematics, whatever. But since nobody has a scanning system that can recognize Greek letters, fractions and square roots, that failing going out and re-making OCR technology to work through the mathematical issues, that remains a technology that remains elusive.
• As I said early on, my hope is that, sometime before I die, I hope to help see this technology happen. So I'll just say that since it hasn't come yet, I would like to be associated with it in one way or another.
• Caryn: I wasn't really thinking about that, but I'd would love to add my strong support for something like that. I'd love to be involved in something like that.
• Tony: It would be fantastic to take a sheet of printed mathematics mixed with text and just: voila.
• David: Push a button and out it comes.
• Tony: And if you could add full-page Braille display, a dream. Hopefully it will become readily available some day. It's a good place to stop if you want, but if you have any thoughts. Anything about this long trek that we forgot to talk about?
• Caryn: I'm just thinking of the incredibly important role that Aaron Leventhal had in the development of Megadots. He was really skilled with PC programming and had an incredible amount of vision and was able to work very closely with us. And I think we all worked really well as a team, and he's gone on to be a supervisor in charge of accessibility issues at Netscape. So that's some of the really good luck we've had--somebody who graduated from Raised Dot and gone off to do other things. He's married to a legally blind woman.
• Tony: Do you know where in the country he is?
• Caryn: He was living in the San Francisco Bay area. Right now he's spending six months in Germany. His wife is from Germany.
• David: I'd say his intensity, his desire to do something good ... Sometimes all that energy was misdirected, and he was very much his own individual, so he kind of said, 'I'm just going to find a way to do this in a way that satisfies myself.' No team ethos. [There was no] 'Everybody must program a certain way, the data structures must have the following characteristics.' You'd just do whatever it took to accomplish certain work, but with the provision that it would be as clean as possible. If something had to be done, he would make sure that that was done unbelievably well the first time he did it. My tendency is to kind of do a half-assed version first and kind of play with it and then we'd do another version later. He would say, 'no, if we're going to do it, let's do it right the first time.' We would kind of work through a design, and he hated introducing new commands unless absolutely necessary. Megadots is littered with amazing ways of doing things without having to learn new commands. You could read through the reference manual. All these different capabilities and you'd shake your head and wonder: how is this all possible. And half the things in there are things that Caryn and David said, 'I don't think this can be done and Aaron said, 'Yes, it can be done and I'll have it ready for you tomorrow.'
• Tony: So you dished out a little of what you received, with the 'I don't think it could be done.'
• David: Yeah.
• All: {Laughter.}
• Caryn: When Aaron started working for Raised Dot, he was like maybe 20 years old and he was just a kid who was very excited about what he was doing. It took us a while to teach him stuff about Braille, but he just really went for it.
• Tony: I don't want to forget -- and I was about to -- to get your thoughts on Braille itself. You studied the structure. The two of you had to understand the structure of Braille in order to do with it what you have. Any thoughts on Braille? Here it is, 150 years after the invention of Braille, and they're still struggling to unify the code around the country and around the world. Do you ever say, 'enough of this, please settle down on something so that all of our technology won't get upended if you decide to make a big change?'
• David: I don't mind changing the rules and things like that. That's perfectly fine. Oh, I'm always full of unpopular thoughts and ideas. I have a lot of wishes, wishes for the infrastructure of Braille, the human infrastructure. Certainly at the turn of the century or soon thereafter there was a pretty great turmoil. It was well written in that little book; it's called "The War of the Dots." I'm sure you've read that. And the result of all the infighting was, an organization with a fascist sound or ring to the name: Braille authority of North America. It was as if,
• 'You should disagree, we'll put you in a gulag.' They're nice people, bla, bla, bla, but nonetheless they're of a very rigid mind set.
• I think the computer field does not work well with that kind of rigidity. There's a sense that the rules of Braille, are independent of the computer, so we'll make the rules and then the computer people slavishly follow those rules. That, to a certain sense, makes sense. You shouldn't reinvent schools just because the dictates weren't what the programmers want. There are any number of institutions where you don't completely, slavishly rearrange life. But, for example, the banking industry has been transformed by the ATM and transactions are broken down into transactions that fit within the model of ATM, and so for the Braille rules, there has to be a recognition that the way in which computers process data must rule the roost. You can't have rules that say, if this word were a noun it shall be contracted this way, if it's a verb, contracted some other way. I mean, get real. That's so 19th Century let's not even go there.
• Tony: Or it's very Kurzweilian for artificial intelligence for the future, but why put everybody through all that?
• David: Yeah. Why should the limited resources of skilled programmers have to try and build in a part of speech analyzer just to make better Braille? So the rule of the Braille are completely orthogonal to computerdom and there are a very small number of them that should be ironed out and straightened out and all the blue haired ladies who disagree should be just ... 'you've had your day; your day is over.' I mean there's also the generation right after World War II, there were a lot of blinded veterans, and there was this great outpouring of volunteer effort, using all the housewives who were now thrown out of defense jobs to become Braille transcribers and teach Braille, and there was a lot of 'how to teach Braille,' and 'how to get Braille out,' that was formed back in those days and if you wanted Braille to last you shellacked it. And you did things a certain way, and now in the year 2003, we shouldn't be trying to distribute Braille [using] that same model of vast numbers of volunteer females. Wake up; they don't exist anymore.
• I think that Braille should be taught from the get go that it should be produced by computer. There should be lessons, you download a file that represents a word file, whatever, and then you send the Braille form and file back and you are judged by the quality by which you can utilize one Braille translator to do stuff. You don't have a training system that's entirely based upon hand transcription with a translator to do stuff. You don't have a training system that's entirely based upon hand transcription with a Perkins Brailler. One of my little spiels is if you have an old model transcriber group and somebody says I'd like to volunteer. I'd like to take this training course; it would probably be a year and a half before your keystrokes become real Braille that a blind person can read, beyond scratch.
• Go to another Braille group, 'Yeah, we're running the scanners here,' or 'maybe you can help us with a little bit of cleanup.' Or you can use typing in Word, 'Here's a little page here; oh by the way, that page is needed tomorrow, so if you type these three paragraphs in, somebody else in the volunteer group will actually do the Braille translation and Braille printout. But the thing is, your keystrokes, right now, will make Braille to be read tomorrow morning.' Well, gee, that is the sort of immediacy an impact that gets people kind of involved. It's a lot better than to wait two years and then add water.
• Tony: Yeah. It doesn't inspire recruitment of people into the field. Now, not to challenge your basic notions, but how would you reconcile -- and this is partly tongue in cheek; I'm just being playful. But that notion of having to learn things the hard drudgery way, so that one could be more appreciative and skillful with the modern ways of doing it, could you reconcile those two?
• David: Sure. Sure.
• Tony: You're never one to refuse a challenge.
• All: {Laughter.}
• David: It's a point well taken, but let's also think about some other things. If we have an engineer, and say you need to in order to design something, you need the sine of a particular angle, we don't necessarily, as a starting point say, as a starting point, the way you calculate a sine is to perform the following infinite series. So we're going to have you spend several days of performing some calculations to follow the one minus 'x' 'q' over three plus 'x' the fifth over five and calculate the cosign or a sine the old fashion way.' 'Wow, I know what a cosign is, or allow you to use it.' I think a calculator, to calculate a sign would be very acceptable, or at one point, I mean in the middle ages, one of the signs of a well educated person is someone who could tell time using a variety of means, be it candles, sundials or an idea of other things as an observation of certain star and sun positions. And you know, right now we don't really think that is a sign of an educated person; a wrist watch works perfectly fine.
• So I think some operations could be so internalized as to become a new baseline. And I would think that you could break down tasks in a way that the key task is being done. Let's say editing, where you force someone to edit a whole bunch a things by hand, now we're going to use global replacement or whatever, that you don't necessarily ask people to do the formatting of Braille or all of the total translation tasks. I think that what you want very much is completely knowing completely all the places where mechanized translators foul up. And to be keenly aware of dashes, hyphens, accented characters. You know, learn all the top twenty gothchas in a Braille sequence. Look at a page and say, there, there, there, there, those are the difficult things. That's the kind of scale I'm talking about giving. Now you can teach that the hard way. Here's the page, circle in red the difficult things; circle in red over here, circle in red here, and you have force people to make the eye and the brain or a voice synthesizer find all those things the hard way first and then maybe learn how to automate that.
• Caryn: The example that David gave before about like the engravers spending two years using the crude tools before using the better tools for engraving, there's some motivation from actually seeing the wonderfully engraved stuff. But for somebody that's just starting to learn to be a Braille transcriber, they're not going to be motivated seeing Braille on a page, so just the extra motivation of being able to make some Braille and feel that they're helping some Braille users, I think is very important.
• David: I'm going to sprinkle a little elitist element in here in that this 'use the crude tools first and then use the easy tools, and then the person has an appreciation of how to properly apply the easy-to-use tools,' often is the best way to develop an artist. And for certain individuals they're chosen to have that seven-year apprenticeship to be a fine engraver. But you don't necessarily want everybody in the fine arts program to spend seven years.
• So in terms of taking fine artists and asking the question, 'How did you get to be as good as you are?' So often you'll find a track the leads through the valley of bad tools. But that doesn't necessarily mean that this is the ideal training way for the masses. And if you want to learn carpentry, you don't necessarily want them to spend two years with a bent screwdriver and then give him a good screwdriver. Sometimes giving him the good screwdriver or give him a saw that's sharp makes sense.
• So I would say the value of bad tools is an analysis that may work in certain circumstances, but certainly it's just something that I tune myself to listen to, and every time I hear one of those little documentaries I'm all kind of aquiver waiting for it. Yes, I knew it! They had this 'very, very, unusual experience where this happened ... '. And I say to myself, 'No it's not unusual; it's very common to have this quote unusual experience of having to learn your craft through a very, very difficult process.'
• Tony: I would say David Holladay, the consummate engineer. It's the engineering philosophy that you just described I think is the essence of it. Because it deals with things on a very practical level. Let's deal with what we're trying to solve and solve it. And if we want to go beyond that, here's a path for that too. But it starts out with the problem and the solution to the problem. I call that consummate engineering, myself. But I'm sure I embarrassed you.
• All: {Laughter.}
• Tony: Caryn, did I interrupt you before?
• Caryn: I was thinking of two things I wanted to say. One was going back to thoughts about Braille, and just that nowadays refreshable Braille devices are a lot more prevalent than they used to be, and one thing that's somewhat missing is, any standard way of formatting Braille for refreshable Braille devices. There is a provisional code called the linear Braille format that shows you where the paragraphs start and where there's a footnote--even when you're reading refreshable Braille. But with a variety of Braille devices out, some of them support that provisional code better, in different ways. There is no real standardization and we need to get an official code that's not just provisional, and a code that's aware of all these structuring and tags that have become more prevalent in the mainstream world.
• END OF Tape 3, SIDE A
• ... a technical committee to come up with a linear Braille format code that's official.
• Tony: You're one of the authorities.
• All: {Laughter.}
• Caryn: It's a fairly new committee, but I'm hopeful that we'll come up with something good.
• The other thought I was having about the crude tools making for expertise. How similar that is to some of the struggles for people with disabilities? Often if somebody is learning something with a disability that in some sense makes things harder. If they really have perseverance, they end up being extremely skilled and knowing things really well.
• David: I can give you a direct example of that in that I used to joke about writing documentation, and the style of writing documentation where I don't use a single illustration or picture, I just use straight words which annoys the heck out of people wanting pictures and diagrams. I find blind individuals to be incredibly smart because they had to learn how to handle stuff as much as possible without pictures and diagrams, and circles and arrows and whatever.
• When people have trouble with documentation, I often kind of laugh about the laziness that eyesight engenders in terms of not really taking the time to actually read a page and understand, what is an author really trying to say? I mean, if there's no picture there, why bother attempting to parse these word things there and blind people are just so hungry for words. They've lived in this world of crude tools that they will just devour the words, chew them up, spit them out and actually understand what's meant there. So I like writing for a blind audience.
• Tony: If we technologize enough, make it easy enough, we'll have a whole bunch of blind people out there who haven't honed the skills. And I wonder if the debate will ever happen that, in effect, we're limiting or decreasing their competitiveness. It's an interesting speculation.
• So I would summarize by saying that we have to keep driving forward with the technology and then let people deal with the consequences by learning how to control their use of the technology, because it's very hard to stop the development of technology. I think that it goes against the grain too much to stop the development of it.
• David: I hope that certain amount of inhibitions can be developed towards weapons technology. Just ... put a little footnote there -- call it a family footnote -- an official protest against the use of technology for inexpensive demolition of human beings.
• Tony: I'm glad that I created the opening for you to stick that in there. I'm glad you said that.
• Caryn: Me too.

END OF Tape 3, SIDE B

End of Interview.