Early History of Braille Translators and Embossers

(The following is extracted from an email message written on June 20, 1995 by Joe Sullivan, President of Duxbury Systems, to an inquirer from Korea who had asked about the early history of computer applications for braille. The "Joe L." who had referred his inquiry is Joe Lazzaro, who has published articles in Byte and elsewhere on computer accessibility for disabled persons.)

Dear Mr. --:

Thank you for your recent message inquiring about the early history of braille translators and embossers, and also to Joe L. for his referral. To help my memory, I spoke yesterday with Bob Gildea, who was the leader of the DOTSYS project at MITRE (which got me involved in braille), and today with George Dalrymple, who worked on the same project at MIT, mainly on the hardware side. With their memories augmenting mine, I think I can attempt a brief synopsis, and I'll send them a copy of this just to be sure. (I'm also sending a copy of this to Brian Lingard, who recently expressed interest on the same subject.) Taking your questions in turn:

> First, What is the first braille translating program in USA?
> When and who announced?

It appears that the first working braille translator in the U.S., and actually anywhere, was the one developed at the American Printing House for the Blind (APH) in Louisville, Kentucky during the early 1960's by IBM and APH. Ann Robinson of IBM (later married to Joseph Shack, who collaborated in later work) started the project, sometime around 1960. The earliest reference that I have listed (but I do not believe I have the paper itself) is an IBM Mathematics and Applications Dept. document entitled "Braille Translation System for the IBM 704" by Ann S. Schack and R.T. Mertz, dated 1961. The APH-IBM system was in use at APH by around 1965 at the latest. John Siems, then an employee of APH (since retired), authored a paper entitled "Report of a New Braille Translation Program at APH" in the Proceedings of a Conference on New Processes for Braille Manufacture held at APH, dated 1968. That APH-IBM system remained in use at APH until just a few years ago -- remarkably, because it was in 704 machine code that had to be emulated on successive machines. However, as a proprietary program of APH's, it was never used elsewhere.

By the late 1960's, there were at least a dozen or so researchers around the world interested in the subject, and several working programs were constructed. Of these, I believe the most influential, and the most widely used -- indeed it was specifically designed for portability -- was the DOTSYS III program that Bob Gildea, Jonathan Millen, W. Reid Gerhart and I produced at the MITRE Corporation in 1969-70 (with some earlier groundwork), with the initial user installation (at the Atlanta Public Schools) taking place in 1970. That program was not only used in its own right at a number of institutions, but also became the "parent" of several subsequent developments -- notably: (1) the "DOTSYS" program used at the Royal National Institute in London, through several rewrites, to this day; (2) a program that IBM called "Braillemaster" that IBM distributed for a time; and (3) the present Duxbury Braille Translator.

A good summary of the state of affairs by 1973 can be obtained by reading the proceedings of the conference held in March, 1973 at the University of Münster in Germany, on "Computerized Braille Production". Papers by Bob Gildea and me describe DOTSYS III, but there are also papers by Coleman (England), Leffler (U.S.), Truquet (France), Vliegenthardt (Netherlands), Leringe (Sweden), Vinding (Denmark), Werner (Germany), Eickenscheidt (Germany), Britz (Germany), and Jakob (Germany). Of course, there were also some researchers who could not attend.

The question of which was the first "commercial" braille translator requires some definition of that term, and so could be somewhat controversial (if anyone actually cares). I have always used "commercial software" to mean a regular product, that is all ready to install, from a regular company. On that grounds, I believe that Duxbury Systems' Duxbury Braille Translator qualifies as the first commercial Braille Translator. Duxbury Systems itself was founded as a partnership called "Gildea, Simpson and Sullivan" in July 1975 in the town of Duxbury, Massachusetts. We promptly began to work on a Translator product (based on the DOTSYS algorithms) and to seek customers. In March 1976, we incorporated as a regular "for-profit" Massachusetts Corporation with our present name. (Of course, being "for-profit" does not guarantee the fact of a profit, which is a whole separate subject.) The first installation of the Duxbury Translator took place at the Canadian National Institute for the Blind in Toronto, Canada, in July 1976 ...

The Duxbury Translator was the first to work with a second contracted language (Spanish, 1976); we have since implemented Arabic, French, Swahili, and a number of others, some of them "firsts" for the language involved. (I have also worked with Korean, but it was necessary to set aside the project before it was finished. Anyway there are already other Korean braille translators, as you are surely aware.)

Duxbury was also among the earliest braille translators to be implemented on a microcomputer -- in the late 1970's (on North Star DOS, CP/M, and Oasis, all predecessors to the MS-DOS that now runs on PC's). In fact, I believe that it was the very first with any commercial presence, but I can't be sure because I believe there were also some other people experimenting, at least, around the same time. I do not believe that we were the first product on MS-DOS (1985), and I am not sure who was, but by that time we were less interested in "firsts". Nevertheless, I believe that we were the first on Macintosh (1989) and Windows (1991), for what it's worth.

> Second, What is the first braille embosser? When and who?

The first embosser for regular braille pages was the BrailleEmboss, which was built at MIT in the late 1960's as the hardware component of the same DOTSYS project that gave rise to the DOTSYS III software at MITRE. George Dalrymple was the engineer for the BraillEmboss; Professor Bob Mann of MIT headed the project as a whole.

George tells me that, at a conference in 1969, there were four braille embossers being shown. His BraillEmboss was the only page brailler; the others (by Carbonneau, Morrison and Knox respectively) were all embossing on paper strips (being modified teletype paper tape punches).

> Third, when was the MIT braille code announced?

This is a good question that has eluded me for a while, too. To drive the BraillEmboss from DOTSYS, I recall using a code that was really a binary code with 8 bits, 6 of which corresponded 1-1 with the dots of braille. The other two bits were used for control (new line/page) and/or parity. Because it drove the MIT BrailleEmboss, I have tended to think of that as "MIT Code". Bob Gildea tells me that he and others laid out that code around 1961; he recalls it as "Paper Tape Code", because often paper tape was used as a medium, the bits being represented as holes in the respective channels.

However, I imagine that you are referring to a different code, one that I now call "North American ASCII-Braille", in which ASCII characters are paired with some braille equivalent that is more or less related in meaning, at least in English Braille. Thus ASCII B (or b) is paired with dots 1-2, because dot combination can mean "b" in English and other Western European braille systems. Thus the 26 letters of the Roman alphabet are easily assigned. Certain other assignments, such as "(" to dots 1-2-3-5-6 and "2" to dots 2-3, were taken from the American math braille code (Nemeth Code), and a few seem to be arbitrary pairings of the characters that were left. In recent years, I have sometimes seen this code referred to as "MIT Code", and have wondered what connection there was to MIT, since that is not the code I recall using with the BraillEmboss. (I believe I first saw the ASCII-Braille code used with the early Triformation products created by Guy Carbonneau -- e.g. the LED-120 -- and so called it "LED Code".)

But in speaking with George Dalrymple, it turns out that there may be some connection with MIT after all. It seems that an ASCII-based code was refined there, at least, even though it might not have started there. The main reason was that binary codes are awkward to transmit through telephone modems, mostly because they appear to be control characters to ASCII-based operating and communication systems, and so it was desirable to switch to ASCII when driving the embossers through telephone lines became possible and desirable. All this happened some time around 1969, though precise dating and even the sequence of events seems to be lost in people's memory.

Regards, Joe Sullivan

Further Notes

• The DOTSYS derivitave developed by RNIB is now called ITS; see Links to Related Sites