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Where does a baby retro computer geek start?

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ablindgibsongirl

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Aug 21, 2014
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Hi everyone. I'm a totally blind computer history enthusiast and i'm wondering what the place of blind people is in the computing community. I feel like there's only so far I can go here and am just an observer.I want to do retro mod builds for people like me who want a real computer without all the nonsense. Is there an oldschool blind geek or two who can tell me where to start. Is it worth getting my hands on an Apple IIE and relearning it? I love the podcast you put the heart and soul back in computing. Oh and I'm fascinated by the Amiga, can an Amiga talk too? Thanks guys. Oh and just so yall know I'm not a script kitty, I believe in first principles so am starting with linux and unix. Thoughts stories and questions are appreciated. No worries you can't offend me I've heard everything you could possibly ask the blind lady. Hell people are still amazed by a blind person using one at all.:)
 
First principles are a good place to start. Not sure about Linux, it's not that old. It's going to be hard to do much with hardware if you can't see the blown capacitors or leaky batteries. Soldering is hard enough with bifocals. Vintage software is cool, if you want first principles there you should look for some of the old Don Lancaster books. His Guru's Lair website is a bit odd these days (Water Soluble Swimsuits? Really?) but his 1980's Machine Language books are great. Hopefully not too heavy on the diagrams.
 
ablindgibsongirl said:
...I want to do retro mod builds for people like me who want a real computer without all the nonsense.
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Might be better to define a reasonably ideal system with features that would be best.

Its probably easier to define a new retro system than to do add-on on vintage systems... and with a new design, its got a lot more use left in it.

Things that may affect such a definition of features:

Voice storage and playback and synthesized sound isn't too expensive and we have cheap integrated circuits that can store unbelievable amounts of that sort of data. So listening to an computer Operating System is practical.

However talking-in commands is not as successful today. Some may counter that Dragon brand-software running on a melt-down core processor can do a good job, but if we're talking vintage, we're really not talking about that much processing power.

Accelerometers are much better than the ones applied in WII games, the problem with using motion based input is that acceleration isn't something that people really grasp in all aspects; its a fast car to most people. And relating acceleration to motion is not as direct as most assume.

An optical motion tracking detector is probably more sensible. A collar-mount camera could track hand motions via a ring or bracelet on each hand... if it has a blinking infrard LED... all the easier.

A keyboard is a good text input device, I seldom look at the screen when I'm typing (and I have the typos to prove it).

Perhaps a mouse that gives relative position by two changing tones - perhaps X axis by changing frequency and Y axis by changing amplitude of another tone... easy to synthesize. When the mouse pointer crosses over an icon the operating system could sound it out... until another icon interrupts and starts its Id. A quick shortcut would be to lead with a short click tone-pattern ID indicating the icon type so when you hear that, you immediately know if its not what you're looking for... a quick audio shortcut.

- - -
Its an interesting idea too, because a sound.display would allow working some vintage type applications with no monitor display. That would add to mobility ease, particularly with a bluetooth earpiece... i.e. working on a subway with no monitor for display... I could imagining entering firmware code with a pair of keyboard mittens instead of a bulky keyboard while listening to the sound.display and mouse.
 
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Yes, Amiga Workbench up to version 1.3 ships with a speech synthesizer (it was removed from later versions due to licensing issues, but will still work fine if manually installed.)

This is a really interesting subject; I'm curious to hear more about accessibility on vintage computers.
 
Hmm, I had a vague notion to the effect of using a braille display and guidance tones to get around a system, sometimes I challenge myself to see if I can get my machine to boot without turning the speech on. I used a notetaker for years and grumbled when teachers asked me to turn the speech on. I like the idea of a mouse using tones to get around in a gui environment. I know too that accessibility like linux is not very old and we've come a long way and yet there is still more to do. I think the best I'll be able to do is get an old portable case and put new hardware in it, yeah, I know, hipster mod but it will actually do something. For my needs I'd like something that can handle just a basic text mode and with the toggle of a switch the raspberry pi gets put in to media mode and off to podcast or youtube we go. Listening goes to a different part of the brain than reading does so computing in braille would be a huge win. Collaberating with other blind hackers would help me to know what is possible. This is fun.THe closest I've seen to a guidance system where you talk to it and it talks back is Emacspeak it seems to give a great deal of control to the user and you feel like your in charge of the computer. It requires a great deal of initial skill so is not the place to start for the beginner, kinda like bash linux.
 
Some old systems wouldn't have software screen readers or enough free resources to run one in the background but you could output the video to an external device that runs optical character recognition software. I'm sure there's an OCR smart phone application that can take a photo of a screen and try to read it but something with a composite video input would be better.
 
Hi ABGG,

This reminds me of a mailing list that I used to frequent back in the 90's. It was called SURVPC because it was about getting older computers to survive, and computing minimalism. Most people there used DOS which is pretty basic but worked for most things back then, even though others had moved to the Windows GUI. Some people were not keen on wasting resources on a GUI and thus another reason for the mailing list.

What I discovered after a little while, and it really surprised me, was that a number of members were blind. They didn't usually tell people that so it wasn't obvious. What was clear is that the text environment worked really well for them. I was amazed at their skill.

I still use DOS on a regular basis and can vouch for the fact that it is still very functional in 2014. There are many things which you cannot do, but what can be done is very useful. In fact last year, I spent a couple of months using almost only DOS, and that included browsing with my favourite browser - lynx.

This post made me all nostalgic and I just went and Googled myself and came up with a funny post. Click here and check out this post. Haha!

No doubt you can find some other threads. They might be an inspiration. I don't know how easy it is for you to use the search box there, but I just put "blind" into it. Click here to see the search results. There's some relevant ideas in those threads.

I've set up numerous DOS machines for people with all kinds of disabilities back in those days. Let me know here, or e-mail to 370@cgs.pw if you want some help in that regard.

Cheers,
Ole
 
commodorejohn said:
This is a really interesting subject; I'm curious to hear more about accessibility on vintage computers.
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This makes two of us. I am excited to see how this project pans out. I wonder if there are vintage braille displays for a reasonable price that are just waiting to be put to use again?

Regarding using Linux or UNIX, I find the notion of using a modern UNIX on an old computer exciting. I have successfully ran unstable (i.e. the most recent code in their repositories back in May) NetBSD 6.99 on a 50 MHz 486- with a SSH and SFTP server. By no means is it fast, but it is certainly usable. NetBSD also has ports for old 68k Macintoshes and 68k Amigas. So such a setup can certainly be done.
 
I wish I had more to contribute to this fascinating discussion, but the only anecdote I can share is the experience of one of the users I used to support at Mark Williams Company, which made a UNIX clone called Coherent for 286 and 386 PCs (this was before Linux). This user was able to use our product through the use of a serially-attached speech synthesizer (turned up to very high speaking speed). I don't recall if he piped output to it on a command-by-command basis, or if it was somehow part of the serial terminal pipeline so that it received every single thing sent to the display, but however the hookup, he was able to take full advantage of our unix system.
 
Speed Listening

Speed Listening

Trixter said:
...This user was able to use our product through the use of a serially-attached speech synthesizer (turned up to very high speaking speed)...
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True, I often listen to audio from shows or news on the PC at higher speeds (1.3x to 1.8x) and it doesn't lose anything. There is an algorithm to maintain the pitch for fast playback.
A discussion about language in the mind slowing down thought is a subject for another day.
 
commodorejohn said:
Yes, Amiga Workbench up to version 1.3 ships with a speech synthesizer (it was removed from later versions due to licensing issues, but will still work fine if manually installed.)
Click to expand...

There is a replacement available on Aminet (I believe this one) which is much improved over the original. It will speak in different accents (including Klingon!) and you can even make it sing. I wrote a program to do that for a song that I band I used to be in did.

Mind you, I don't know about the usefulness. You pretty much have to have a text file that you can have it read, and, it reads out everything explicitly.
 
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If you want the vintage experience and you read braille then perhaps you should get a Braille Printer. I am pretty sure that's the real vintage experience for yourself! There appear to be some on e-Bay but I am pretty sure in the day we had adaptations that let us print braille on "normal" impact, so daisy wheel printers,,...
 
I think the Apple IIE had a serial attached speech box, you controlled the speed with a nob it changed the pitch as the speed went up. it used Echo speech if I'm remembering right. Oh I'd love a braille embosser, I've heard what the daisy wheel printers sound like and they are very much like what the old braille blazie sounded like. It printed one line at a time. you had to set baud rate, parity, and get the serial port setting right or no go. Ah yes, the braillenspeak, that was my first notetaker. No braille display there just a funny robot voice with an odd german accent. They're on youtube. From there it was a braillelite eighteen cell, no more robot boice unless a teacher wanted to hear its chatter. Then on to what is now a six thousand dollar paper weight the Braillenote thirty two. Unfortunately the display stopped working or I'd salvage it. Specialized tech ain't cheap. I miss hardcopy braille, that will come in handy for command list cheat sheets and learning programming language. Yes I'm crazy enough to want to stare at code. I've got my perkins brailler all manual, think braille typewriter. It needs to be recallobrated and oiled but I can do that at some point. Other than that I've got the vinux beast of a pc, from two thousand six with a floppy drive and both serial and paralel ports, oh and a compact flash and sd card reader. I haven't tested the floppy drive, I know the card reader works. Other than that it's a slate and stylus, pen and paper for us, and the iPAD. My Apple IIE disappeared long ago.
 
I know it says that ablindgibsongirl hasn't logged on since August 22, but just in case she somehow receives notifications of new posts off site:

Has there been any new developments in setting up your vintage workstation?
 
I've started messing around with my beasty of a pc but have come to recognize that I am still in the rnd phaise of all this. It starts with fascination followed by data gathering. so far I've found that blind people really did use Dos and Unix at the time and that the braille and speak was a great little synth for speech with a dos machine as the terminal. Considering that not much of this would be of practical use today I'm wondering how to bring it back to bring it forward if that makes sense, use the retro experience of computing minimalism to do things today. As far as the braille display goes there's the Transforming Braille project which is working to create a low cost unit since for years they were a dream beyond many of us. This is grand news indeed as many have wondered at the usefulness of braille in the age of the IPAD. Of course any way of gaining direct access is a huge win. I think the only way to really know what is useful and possible is to sit with a few old geeks who have made the attempt and see what comes up, ya know plug in the old hardware and see what happens. I'd like my interest to be of real use.Oh and I've discovered the Linux based notetaker, stil more reading to do. Thanks for the links to the mailing list.
 
I know from building custom Linux kernels that support for braille terminal devices is still present in the kernel. That'd get you early kernel message just like a serial terminal, and should also function as the system console. I suppose the difficulty there would be in finding a compatible braille terminal.
 
There was also the Dectalk speech synthesizer, which I think was intended to connect between a terminal and a computer. Was that configuration ever used by blind users of DEC machines? I have a Dectalk, but I haven't done much with it so far.
 
That's a good question. You'd think DEC would've had a leg up on the Unices in that department, on account of actually supporting readable quasi-English terms in their command shells...
 
ablindgibsongirl said:
... I'm wondering how ... to bring it forward ... use the retro experience of computing minimalism to do things today ...
Click to expand...
I mentioned voice synthesis in my original message here. You can do a lot better today than the era of the "Compu-Talker" that was in the movie, "Wargames".

Today the faster frequency and processing power of even an 8-bit micro can access a text stream grouped as letters, numbers or words and perform an efficient look-up into a silicon data storage chip to copy an associated voice snippet into a real-time playback buffer, supporting continuous digitized voice playback.

The audio circuit is inexpensive. A data storage chip I'm using contains 1 GigaByte in each chip, that equivalent to a huge amount of voice-band playback.

I think to be more practical as part of a sound-monitor it needs to playback at faster speeds; that's just firmware in the micro.

I have a really good application note for design engineers talking about doing voice record, storage and playback mostly inside the micro itself. Its likely necessary that a more specialized micro would be used in the voice record circuitry to create the digital records, but then a more operating system capable micro, even a fast 8-bit could run your retro operating system while also doing the text look-up and playback.

If done right, you should be able to add or replace playbacks for letters, numbers and words in your own voice.

Note this could also render the sound cues for the position of the mouse on the screen.

This isn't a hobbyist project.
 
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