> > I put a few digital camera photos of a old braille terminal (Feb
> > 1977 vintage) in a directory at http://www.cs.umn.edu/~lemay/braille
>
> Thanks. I was kind of curious what the output side of the thing
> looked like. I was expecting something like a fixed part-of-line
> Braille display, but I guess paper would work better. What's it got,
> a moving embossing head of some sort?
Now that I've recharged my batteries, i've put two more photos in that
directory, with closeup shots of the printing mechanism. No, there is
no moving head which a blind person wouldnt be able to see moving. The
'paper' is very tough, almost identical to IBM punch cards. And as you see
in the photo there are rows of holes, that have some sort of rod that
pops up from behind to punch a raised round dot into the paper/cardboard
sheets.
I'm sot sure what will happen with this terminal. I hear we have to
contact the Navy to see if they want it back, since it was originally
purchased by them. After that, I guess its destined to be scrapped.
Oh, does anyone know what these three chips are:
93419-DC
F 8002
--------
~/011 ~ should be double wavy lines
MM5303N
--------
sn74186N (three of these are on the board
-Lawrence LeMay
>
> > I'm not quite sure what to do with this unit. There probably werent many
> > braille terminals made in the 70's, and like most things, they probably
> > were disposed of when they became obsolete. Maybe this should be donated
> > to a computer museum.
>
> There were other widgets in the 1980s, I seem to remember a
> description of a screen-scraper with Braille output that could be
> fitted to an Apple ][.
>
> I guess they are obsolete. Until recently I was working with a blind
> programmer/manager, and I was somewhere on her call-for-help list when
> her PC misbehaved. When it wasn't misbehaving, she had screen-reader
> software (something called JAWS from Henter-Joyce) that let her do
> what she needed to do reasonably comfortably under WinNT. It worked
> well enough for her to use Outlook and MS Word; I never saw her trying
> to use a web browser so I don't know how well it worked with that.
>
> I'm trying to synch up with her for dinner, and if you like I'll try
> to find out what she knows about this sort of thing. Don't know if
> she's ever used one, though; she has talked about using what I
> gathered were unmodified Silent 700s and I still haven't figured out
> how that worked if/when she got unexpected output.
>
> -Frank McConnell
>
Received on Mon Aug 23 1999 - 14:27:46 BST