Listen to Blazie Interview, Part 2
Deane Blazie: In observing my children who exhibit some of these learning disabilities, and how I learned more about disabilities, I realize that I tended to be an audio learner, that it was difficult for me to see things and figure them out at that age, which is why I had trouble reading. I guess I was probably somewhat dyslexic back then, and I may be still.
But I had more trouble looking at charts and books and making sense out of them than if I'd hear people speak. I was more of an audio learner than a visual learner.
I remember watching Tim, and he was of course very audio sensitized, and he used touch a lot. So I realized there is a difference in the way the brain processes information. In particular, braille was a big eye opener for me. I had heard all my life that braille was special and that feeling something was tantamount to seeing it on paper as opposed to hearing it on a cassette.
So it took me a long time to really, I heard it a lot but it took me a long time to understand and to really get it that feeling braille, like you do on a Braille Lite is enormously different than hearing it on say a Braille 'N Speak or cassette recorder. I know, intellectually, I knew that but to really understand it, it took me a long, long time to really see that, that that mode of learning and that mode of processing of information is so different.
I didn't really completely get that until I came out with the Braille Lite and saw people using it, literally saw hundreds of people and watched them, watched their fingers, watched the way they operated it, saw them actually using it. Then it became clear to me that that mode is so, so special that we've got to remember it when we design products. That it is absolutely special and braille is never going to go away. It's extraordinarily important. So we latched onto that and most of our products you can kind of see that in most of our products, braille became the most important part of our business, as opposed to speech.
Tony Candela: Let's bring you back to your college days. So you got out of high school and, as your mother not only predicted but probably insisted, you went on to University and your father too, I'm sure. So tell us a bit about your college years.
Deane Blazie: I had a great time in college. I really had a fun time. I went away to school, to the University of Kentucky. It was about a 30-mile drive from the University back to Frankfurt, which is where I lived, which is where my family lived and where Tim lives, and I worked for him on weekends. During the weekend I'd go back.
I remember school. I remember trying, knowing that I would have to work really hard in English. I remember that. And I remember fearing it and I remember when they did a reading assignment how I'd really have to, this time I'd really have to do it. I couldn't get by with the Classics Illustrated comic books anymore. I really had to do it.
So I did work a little bit harder on English and those things. But I remember physics and chemistry were relatively easy for me. Not that I didn't study. Of course I studied, but for some reason it wasn't the struggle, it wasn't taking tests and failing the tests like a lot of my dormitory roommates. There were guys from around Kentucky and we'd all take the tests and I'd see Ds and some Es and Fs. These poor guys. I'd see them flunking out of school and it didn't happen to me. I don't know why because I didn't have that high an opinion of myself making it through school but for some reason it just became easy for me.
I guess I had an aptitude that was hidden all those years and I didn't know it. So I remember I really, really liked chemistry and I really liked physics. Calculus was more abstract but again it wasn't that difficult for me. Not that it was easy either, but for some reason I managed to do well on tests and I understood the material. I really enjoyed that.
Another thing that struck me in school was computers were just becoming used really. I remember my first computer programming class was FORTRAN II. It was taught by the Electrical Engineering department, because there was no computer science curriculum anywhere, at that time. I remember taking that. And I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed taking FORTRAN and the punch cards. I used to stick them in the slot at night and you'd come back the next day and get your results and you'd have to submit them again because you had a comma in the wrong place or something. But it was still like working a puzzle and it was a lot of fun. And I really enjoyed the FORTRAN stuff.
And I took every computer class that they offered at the university, although I kind of developed also this attitude that I didn't want to be stuck sitting in an office all day, programming computers. For some reason people talked about that in a negative way and I latched on to that thinking. I don't want to be a computer guy.
So when I started interviewing, my senior year, all these computer jobs came up and I said, "No, I don't want to do that." And in retrospect that was a mistake because every single job I took, I ended up latching on to the computer part of the job because that's what I liked to do. I really enjoyed the computing part.
And eventually I got over this negative attitude I had about working on computers and ended up doing mostly computer-type work. But school was a lot of fun. I did ham radio work. I was president of the ham radio club at the university. W4JP was the station. I met a lot of people in college and one of my best friends still, Don Belcher, I met him my freshman year because I took my ham radio to school and he and I became friends and I still communicate with him once in a while.
Don's retired now too, but we did a lot of ham radio things in the school and traveled a bit together and studied a lot together, both got our degrees around the same time.
I remember hands-on stuff in school was great. The laboratories, I really enjoyed the electronics laboratories and I would take my radios in, transmitters, and fix them. Things that I couldn't do before, now I was able to, because I had a better understanding of how things worked. So I really enjoyed the laboratories in school.
I enjoyed the camaraderie of all the guys I studied with. We still keep in touch somewhat, some of us do. We studied in groups together and I just enjoyed virtually all the electronics classes I took.
Some classes I had to take that I didn't enjoy like I took Economic Geography. I'll never forget that. My brother-in-law, Ben, said, "You ought to take that. It's a really easy course." I guess it was but I think I got a D in that course. The only D I got in all of college was in that course. To me it was just not fun, not interesting and I just had to really work at it to get that.
So that was sort of college for me was sticking with the technical things and struggling through the non-technical things.
Tony Candela: Later, of course, you created your own business. Did you take any business classes anywhere along the way?
Deane Blazie: I did take economics. Economics 102 or something like that, one of the basic economics courses. And I'm glad I did because I learned things like supply and demand and how to analyze numbers. That was probably good.
I ended up taking some accounting courses after I started my business, which helped also. But that basic economics course was an eye opener to me and I'm glad I took that. Every engineer really should take some of those courses, because you never know if you're going to be in business for yourself or not.
Tony Candela: And it does seem like many engineers do go into business on some level. You hear about that happening a lot.
Deane Blazie: Yeah, I think a fair number. My brother-in-law, like I said, he's an engineer. I didn't think I told you, Ben, he's a civil engineer. Both of his children are civil engineers. So a lot of engineering tends to stay in the family.
Tony Candela: Did you have any career-directing experiences that you can recall, from your college years, or was it just preparatory? Did some person come along in your life that sent you in a particular direction during those years?
Deane Blazie: Other than Tim Cranmer, I'd say no. He was probably the only one. The rest just came by chance, a lot of it by chance, and a lot of it by desire, by natural inclination toward that like the computer things, which I didn't want to do but ended up deciding that it was probably something that I was better at and really liked it.
Tony Candela: What years were you in college?
Deane Blazie: I started in September of 1964 and I graduated in June of 1968, and I went to one summer session in '67.
Tony Candela: So you were in college right as the Vietnam War was heating up. Did that affect you at all?
Deane Blazie: Yeah, actually it had a big effect on my life. I worked for Tim every Saturday, like I said. But I also worked at the University, I worked in some of the laboratories for a professor there, John Jackson, building some circuits for a naval contract he had.
In my senior year, end of my junior year and my senior year, I worked at the University Medical Center, some doctors doing research on chronic lung diseases, mostly emphysema and black lung and those things and I really enjoyed that, thoroughly enjoyed it. We encouraged patients to breathe radioactive substance. We had these counters, an array of the assimilation counters on their back and we measured how this radioactive gas was dispersed into their blood and how it diffused through their lungs.
It was really great research. I loved it. And my plan was to stay at the University and get a master's degree and work full time at the University in this research department.
Well, I don't know when the draft lottery was. I think it was in 1968. Either late '67 or '68. My draft number was 65. So I knew I was going to be drafted. I didn't particularly want to go so I knew...they also cancelled draft deferment for master's degrees, for graduate degrees, so I decided to look around. Some one said, "You can get a draft-deferred job."
So I started looking at different contractors and interviewing and I interviewed with some one from Western Electric and they had some jobs that they thought they could get me a draft deferment, which is what most of the college guys, engineers, were doing at that time, in order to stay out of Vietnam.
So I took a job with Western Electric and I worked in New Mexico. Marty and I packed up our bags, drove a car, and headed out to New Mexico and worked out there for a year and a half. And I did get a draft deferment for a year, and they ended up closing down the site. It was an old radar site where we were doing re-entry vehicle research measuring, watching missiles come back in the atmosphere and exploding into multiple pieces and trying to figure out which ones were real and which ones weren't.
It was a fun job. They asked me to do the computer part of it and I said no, because I didn't want to get stuck with computers. That's a bad attitude I had. And it turned out I spent a lot of time at that job too, on computers.
Time-share computers were just coming out. General Electric time-share. They had the old 110-BAUD teletypes: ten characters a second. I remember spending hours and hours on that thing, just writing equations and figuring out things, using that time-share computer.
Tony Candela: So your first job out of college was in New Mexico and it was a direct result of looking for a draft-deferred job?
Deane Blazie: Pretty much, yes. I wanted to stay and get a master's degree and I couldn't do that there so I took this job and I worked on a master's degree while I was there.
Tony Candela: Oh, so you worked on a master's degree. And were you still affiliated with the University of Kentucky or was it a different university?
Deane Blazie: New Mexico State University there in Las Cruces, New Mexico. It turns out that an old professor who was teaching at Kentucky was out there teaching. So I ended up taking some classes with him. And he knew me because I had been in some of his classes.
So that worked out pretty well. I think I got...six or nine hours of college credit from New Mexico State.
Tony Candela: Did you finish that master's degree?
Deane Blazie: I did finish it but it was years later, after going to three other universities.
When they closed the radar site down, I interviewed again and decided to take a job with the person I mentioned, Don Belcher, who was my class roommate. He found something down here in Florida, in Melbourne. I took a job there for a company called Radiation. We designed transmitters, high frequency transmitters, mostly for government contracts. In fact, part of it was to support the war in Vietnam. We were designing some transmitters for surveillance over there.
Same thing with that job. I got into the computer area and started doing mostly computer stuff. I really enjoyed it, but I was the second guy to get drafted out of that company. They had gotten draft deferments for all of their employees that were of draft age, which was quite a high number, but they could not keep me out of the draft. My draft board essentially said, "No." I had plenty of time to join, if I really wanted to serve the country and that they were going to take me.
Tony Candela: So you got drafted?
Deane Blazie: Yeah. So Marty and I, we tried to join the Army. I tried to join, actually, the Navy and the Air Force and they both said, because I had a child, that they couldn't take me because you couldn't raise a family on what I was making as a person in the Air Force or the Navy.
Then I decided to go join the Army and get into a career field that I wouldn't get sent to Vietnam. Or a career field where I could use my engineering expertise. And they said the same thing. They said that it was against their rules to let me join because I had a wife and a child. But yet they could still draft me.
So I wrote to my congressman thinking this is crazy. He agreed it was crazy and the Draft Board said, essentially said, "Mr. Blazie had plenty of time to join the service of his country if he really wanted to. He's going to be drafted." So essentially, mind your own business.
So I took my family back to Kentucky and let them draft me out of Kentucky, where my wife could be near home. She ended up getting a job working for Tim Cranmer as one of his assistants, working for the State, while I was away at Fort Knox in basic training. That was in 1970. Then in 1971 I ended up getting sent to Aberdeen, Maryland, as part of the Army's S&E program, Science and Engineering.
And they tried to pick people with technical degrees and put them in technical fields, where they can use their expertise and where the Army needs you. So I was fortunate to get selected for that program and I spent eighteen months at Aberdeen.
Tony Candela: We hear about the Aberdeen Proving Grounds. Is that related to this Aberdeen?
Deane Blazie: Yes. It's called Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland. They do all kind of things up there.
Tony Candela: So were you drafted as a private?
Deane Blazie: Yes. I was a private and ended up getting out as a specialist 5, Spec 5 they called it.
Tony Candela: So along the way you didn't go to Officer Candidate School and take advantage of the fact you had a college diploma and become an officer? You just went through and got out?
Deane Blazie: That's right.
I was advised, actually, when I was being drafted, when I worked for Radiation, this retired colonel was working for them at the time. And so, some one took me over to talk to him and he said, "You know, there's nothing you can do about staying out, but my own advice to you is don't join." He said, "Let them draft you, because during the Korean War, which is the last major confrontation we had, they were letting people out early when the war started winding down." And there was already talk at that time about the war cranking down.
So I took his advice. I didn't have much choice. I could volunteer for the draft but he said, "Don't do that." So I ended up getting out in eighteen months when Nixon shut the war down.
But while I was in the Army I did work for the Army Human Engineering Lab, Human Factors Lab. And that's where they tried to design Army things that fit the soldier better. For example, they designed a tank that it doesn't take a midget to drive. Or they would design helmets that would fit a wide range of heads, as opposed to just one size [of] head. Human factors.
And it turns out that was a great education for me too, for designing products. Because every time I think about a product feature I would think of my human factors stuff and I would be very conscious of how important that was. It's not just pick one and go with it, it's very important to do it right.
So I ended up getting a good education from there too.
Tony Candela: I would venture to say that human factors is more a part of engineer's training now than it was back then.
Deane Blazie: I'm still not certain that it's a big part of the curriculum like it should be. I'm watching my son in school. He's in an engineering-like curriculum and I don't see any human factors courses there at all. But there really should be. It's just like accounting. There should be.
But when you only have four years of education to get bachelors degree, it's hard to stuff all these extra things in there.
Tony Candela: Still today you find products being developed for the general market that many people have a hard time using, not just blind people. To this very day, apparently, Deane Blazie, you are right. The engineers are not being taught human factors thinking.
Deane Blazie: I can't believe it. I still have a hard time believing a brand new product comes out and the human factors are just awful. But they do. They still do it. They do it in automobiles. Although I have to say I think, I drive a lot of different cars and the Germans and the Japanese tend to be much more conscious of human factors than I think the American car [makers are]. You can just feel it when you drive the car. You can feel where the buttons are, the features of the car that you find yourself going around to get a package out of the other door and the door's locked. Or the trunk is locked and you have to come all the way back to the driver's side, push an unlock button, walk back around and unlock it. Things like that just shouldn't happen, in my opinion, or there should be a way around it.
And the Germans and Japanese seem to be much more cognizant of that. I drive an American SUV up in Maryland. And I've got big hands but the buttons on the steering wheel, to make the radio go next channel and volume all that, cruise control, you have to almost take your hands off the steering wheel to push 'em, cause they're way, way, way inside and thumbs aren't that long, normally. I've got big hands. This just shouldn't happen.
So the human factors still aren't considered as high a priority as they ought to be in product design.
Tony Candela: And the latest barrier for blind people, and we're recording this in April of 2004, is the flat screen, very non-tactile, point of sale devices that you find in check out counters in stores. Once again, even with all the history we have of human factors engineering to make products accessible, they still continue to come out.
Accessible voting machines is another big one people struggle with. So we do make progress, but it seems like we have to make a half step back all the time to move the next step forward.
Deane Blazie: Just to document it, if some of these engineers that make the touch screen devices want to look at some human factors that might be applicable for the blind, the device that I was working on when Freedom Scientific took over and merged our companies, one of them was called the SAL, Speech Assisted Learning. Sally Mangold designed it to use it with us. That device uses a regular touch panel, like you'd see on a Portacell terminal, except it's been desensitized so that it requires a fair amount of force to activate it and you can put braille or clear plastic overlays on it and navigate the overlay without activating the display and then you can push and activate the display.
And that would be very simple to do at a regular point of sale terminal. So that technology is available. It just needs to be used appropriately.
Tony Candela: Before I forget to ask, it strikes me, if I understood the chronology that somewhere in college you met Marty. When did you meet Marty?
Deane Blazie: I met Marty late in my sophomore year through a roommate, my roommate was dating Marty's roommate and I met her actually in the lunchroom at the cafeteria at the Student Union building at Kentucky and took a fancy to her right away. A bunch of us got together on a date, sort of a group date. She was with my brother, Joe, and I was with one of her roommates that I was dating. I remember we played footsies under the table. That kind of got us connected and we started dating from that point. And here it is about 38, 39 years later and we're still dating.
Tony Candela: We thank you for continuing our faith that people can get together and stay together through I'm sure, thick and thin.
Deane Blazie: Well I have to say that Marty put a lot more effort into it than I probably have. She deserves more of the credit.
Tony Candela: And most men would say that, wouldn't they? [Laughter]
It must have been rough for her when you went off to Maryland, when you got drafted.
Deane Blazie: It was. It was very difficult for both of us, but probably especially for her. I remember the day I had to report at the bus station. It was a cold, dreary, rainy day and we had to say goodbye there at the bus station. She drove me up and I said goodbye to her and to my son Brian. Brian was a little over a year old at the time. And went on off. And it was really a very, very sad, difficult time, going away like that.
And she spent, I guess the better part of three or four months working for Tim Cranmer and I think it's called Volunteers for the Blind in Kentucky, doing just whatever it was needed to be done. She drove people around, did secretarial work, organizing, telephone work. My mother and dad lived in town so my mother helped a lot out with Brian, taking care of him. He was in a day care center. That was difficult for him too, at that age, to be taken out of the family, put in a day care center. It was really tough for him. I remember some issues that made me think of how difficult it must have been for him.
But Marty struggled through it, as we always do. I guess it was March of the following year, it had to be '71, we loaded up a big U-Haul truck and drove it up to Maryland, Marty and I and my mother.
And interesting, when I was working down here in Florida, the previous year, we had a really nice house on the water, on a little canal like waterway and just a great life. I mean it was wonderful. I was making $10,000 a year, which back then was a really good working wage. Probably equivalent to $50,000 right now. Fresh out of school. Nice job.
The next year I still have somewhere my W2. The following year I made $4,200. So I went from one income to $4,200, in one fell swoop. And I remember driving Marty and my mother, she came up with us and Brian in this truck and we landed in Maryland and I drove up to this house that I had rented and it was an old, WWII housing unit in a really run-down neighborhood and it was just awful.
And my wife and my mother thought I was joking. They really did. They thought I was kidding because this was such a step down from where we were. It was really a pretty poor house but it was all we could afford on $80 a month and it was just all we could afford. We just didn't make enough money.
But we ended up living there and we had a fine time. Sometimes the struggle in life is much more, you're happier during the struggle than sometimes you are after you've made it and we still talk about how difficult it was but how great life was. We had such a great, great time.
Tony Candela: Were you worried about having to go to Vietnam anywhere along the way, after you got in the Army?
Deane Blazie: Yeah, I was worried. I just accepted the fact that it was probably going to happen because most of the guys were going to Vietnam. That's all there was to it. And when I got my orders, I was really surprised that I didn't have to go, that I was sent to Aberdeen.
Tony Candela: Did you have a party?
Deane Blazie: No. We didn't have a party but I was very happy. I remember that.
Tony Candela: The war started to wind down and you were in the Army for how long?
Deane Blazie: I was only in for eighteen months. They were trying to get people out as soon as they could and eighteen months was a minimum you could spend and still get veterans benefits. They wanted to give everyone that.
It wasn't really that bad. Once I was in the Army and sent to Aberdeen and we got settled in a house...other than the pay was pretty poor. We were on welfare actually for one year because my income was so low. We got free food. They didn't do food stamps back then. You'd go up and pick up a box of free food once a month. We got cheeses and canned food and beans, the staple food. It really wasn't probably a good way to do it. I think we only did that a few times because we were able to survive. I think Marty worked part time too doing some things. And that helped out.
Tony Candela: Did you have feelings about having to occasionally go to get your food box?
Deane Blazie: No. Really none at all. I figured it was just something you had to do and no, I wasn't proud. I was a worker. I did everything I could.
By the way, I also worked part time jobs during the military. Craft shops. These were places where they did woodworking and they had all these craft spots. I repaired televisions around the laboratory where I worked and earned a lot of extra money that way too.
We weren't really hurting for money but when someone mentioned, one of the other GIs mentioned that there was free food available, I figured why not? So we went and picked it up. It wasn't bad. It helped.
Tony Candela: It was probably in effect the Army supplement, as it were.
Deane Blazie: Yeah, yeah. It probably was. I suspect they were mostly GIs that were eligible and a small amount of the locals.
Tony Candela: You left the Army and now you were eligible for benefits under the GI Bill. Were you able to take advantage of any of those benefits?
Deane Blazie: Not really. I did enroll in an electronics course from DeVry Institute, which a lot of the guys were doing. You managed to build a color television, which you got to keep so we all did that.
It was probably somewhat of a scam considering I was an engineer already, but most of the GIs who got out who were in the laboratories did that.
I have to say, too, by the way, that I was probably a pretty poor soldier, in terms of the attitude that I was educated and what was I doing here? Why was I being educated to do this menial stuff, like KP and all the things that you have to do in the military and all the discipline? But in retrospect, I needed it. I was a young kid and the discipline was very, very good for me, teaching me that you can do these things and you have to do these things and you just obey orders and you don't ask a lot of questions and you just do what you're told. And it has to be that way in the military.
And if I could change one thing with this country it would be that everybody who gets out of high school immediately does two years in government service. Doesn't matter whether you're blind, crippled, normal, physically able, physically disabled, doesn't matter. There are jobs everybody can do for the country and we should give two years to do that. I think you'd find that the college success rate would be at least double what it is now. People would be willing to go to college and want to learn because they saw what it was like to have to do it the hard way.
Tony Candela: And two years of service at that stage of life is two years of maturation.
Deane Blazie: It is. It could cut taxes. It could give us a nice work force that the country could use. It just makes so much sense. But, that's my politics.
Tony Candela: And in other countries, that's exactly what they do, whether it's you have to do military service or you have to do some kind of service. It does happen in other places.
Deane Blazie: Yeah, it does. And it seems to work well there too, from what I hear.
Tony Candela: Well, this does inspire me to ask you a little bit more about your military experience. How did you take to shooting guns and throwing hand grenades and things that really could do damage?
Deane Blazie: I never was much on guns. I did play with guns when I was a kid. I had BB guns and .22 rifles and we used to go hunting but I never really was big into it. So I did the gun thing and I got my marksman medals and all that, threw the hand grenades, which I did enjoy that because it made a big boom. I liked making firecrackers and bombs when I was a kid. That was a lot of fun, but I had hoped I would never have to shoot a gun and tote one around for real.
When I was assigned to a company in Aberdeen Proving Ground I had a choice. They were asking for people who wanted to be in the Honor Guard and if you chose to be in The Honor Guard then you could get out of KP work. And I really didn't like KP work. It was not only disgusting, hard manual labor but you had to put up with these kitchen cooks. The cooks were notorious for being mean and nasty to the GIs. So I chose to go in the Honor Guard and that was really good because it taught discipline, it taught looking nice, it taught skill with rifles and how to do all the maneuvers in a really nice, professional way. I got to attend a lot of funerals, twenty-one gun salutes and that had an effect on me, seeing people serve our country and what they get for it, they get this nice military funeral. That was a good experience. I was glad I joined the Honor Guard and got to experience that.
Tony Candela: Were some of the funerals for people that died in Vietnam?
Deane Blazie: Yup. Some of them were for the young fellows that died in Vietnam. Some of them were for more elderly, retired people who had earned the right to a military funeral. They were always sad but they were always interesting to go to.
Tony Candela: Did you go to Arlington National Cemetery for any of your Honor Guard work?
Deane Blazie: No, we didn't. The Honor Guards covered an area right near your base, so there would have been somebody in Washington that would cover Arlington Cemetery. We covered the Maryland area near Baltimore, northeast Baltimore, Delaware.
Tony Candela: Now your assignment to Aberdeen I take it was your introduction to the state of Maryland.
Deane Blazie: Yes.
Tony Candela: So you'd never been there before.
Deane Blazie: Didn't even know where Aberdeen Proving Ground was when I got the orders. I had to research it.
Tony Candela: And well I see that you still have a place that you stay in, a few months of the year, in Maryland. Have you never left Maryland since those days?
Deane Blazie: That's right. We've always lived in Maryland ever since 1971.
Maryland's a beautiful state. It's a lot like Kentucky in terms of the rolling hills. A lot of racehorses come out of Maryland so it wasn't a huge change from Kentucky. The people are different. Kentucky is more of the South. Maryland is more of the Northeast. But it's a pleasant place. The weather was similar to Kentucky so it wasn't a big change. Chesapeake Bay is there, although I never, I didn't really begin to start using it until a few years ago. But it's a nice place to live.
Tony Candela: After you left the Army, where did you go?
Deane Blazie: I took a job with Western Electric and went to New Mexico. Worked in radar, about forty-five miles outside of Las Cruces on White Sands Missile Range.
My job was to keep this one radar operating and modified to do the particular tests that we were doing, watching vehicles reenter the atmosphere. They'd shoot a rocket off at Vandenberg Air Force Base out in California and we would acquire it on the radar and then track it as it came in.
You learned a lot about microwaves and huge klystron tubes that were fifteen feet long and run on 200,000 volts and put out megawatts of power and agenic cooling and masers, microwave amplifiers. I learned a lot. It was really a pretty good place to learn to work.
Tony Candela: I don't know that the general public remembers that microwaves were being used, at least as far back as the '60s and certainly in the early '70s. People think of the microwave oven and they don't realize that there was all this other work going on with microwaves.
Deane Blazie: Yeah, oh yeah. Microwaves were, well when radar was first invented it was pretty close to microwave at that time. And this was in '68 that I started that job. And this was a closed down site, one of the Nike X sites. I guess the Nike project had been cancelled, I'm not sure but we took over one of their sites and used it for these measurements.
Radars and microwaves were pretty big back then. I suspect they were invented, discovered, some time in the '50s, but I don't know that.
Tony Candela: And what did you do after that job?
Deane Blazie: I took a job down in Florida, here in Melborne, designing these transmitters, mostly for military applications. And again, mostly I did computer work at that time. I discovered their computers there and started using them for design. Kind of used their design programs to make the design of these circuits easier and better by using computers instead of—it was all done by slide rules and calculators back then. [I] enjoyed that work, too, and learned a lot about radio frequency and transmitters and just a little bit more professional than what I had learned in my ham radio work, which happened to be very similar to designing circuits.
And don't forget, all during this time, when I was at Aberdeen and Florida, I was also doing projects for Tim Cranmer. In my basement, I would design; I started out with the Audio Tactile Display. I don't know if you remember the first, when Telesensory announced a calculator, what was it called, the first calculator, talking calculator?
Tony Candela: Speech Plus.
Deane Blazie: Speech Plus, that's right. A couple of years before they announced that, Tim came up with this idea of a way to read digital displays. Because displays were coming out in different products at that time and he came up with the idea that if you had a, imagine that you wanted to read a four digit number, say the time of day, like 12:05. He came up with a display, which was a flat panel, and it had four columns of braille. The top digit on each column would be 9 and as you felt your way down the column it would read 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 and zero on the bottom.
So you had these four columns and each column had the ten digits in it. So if 12:05 was being displayed, what you would do, you would start at the top left and you would run your finger down the column until you heard a beep. And then you'd feel a 1. And the next column you'd hear a beep at 2. And you'd read all four columns that way and you'd compose the four digits of the number you wanted to read.
And he called it the Audio Tactile Display. And Telesensory at that same time was looking for a way to make a calculator for the blind, as one of their next products. This was before, it was after the Optacon but before the VersaBraille.
So they signed an agreement with Tim which he patented this thing, the Audio Tactile Display. They signed an agreement with Tim to tie up that technology so that they could use it in their calculator.
What ended up happening was Telesensory, at the same time, speech became compressible to such an extent that the memory, the digital memory available at the time could hold a sufficient amount of speech to speak to digits of a calculator. So Telesensory ended up opting away from the audio-tactile display and going instead toward the calculator, the talking speech plus calculator.
But that was really a neat device and Tim and I, I made about half a dozen different devices using that technology. I took Canon, Canon made a calculator. I took that Canon calculator and made a pretty wide display and had it, using audio tactile display, to make a calculator the blind could use.
And then we made a bunch of stopwatches. Stopwatches, you know, measuring digital time with a stopwatch is a pretty tedious thing cause the hands are really tiny and they move and you've got to be careful not to break them off. So we made half a dozen of these stopwatches, some would be read out to the tenth of a second. Some of them more than that. Like a hundredth of a second.
So these stopwatches were pretty useful for a lot of different things. In fact, it wasn't over a year ago that I met somebody, I don't remember where but told me they were still using their audio tactile stopwatch. They were used a lot in radio stations and radio services, where you needed to measure time and you didn't know how much time has lapsed.
What you could do with this, for example, suppose you wanted to know when two minutes were up. You could just put your finger on the two minute braille cell and just sit there and go about your business and then when it beeped, you'd know that was two minutes. And you could do two or three of these cells with one hand and you could get just about any time you wanted.
So it had some unique advantages to even the speech technology. But, like I said, Telesensory found the speech technology so they ended up not even using it.
I bet I sold maybe thirty or forty of these stopwatches, just around the country. Tim would tell people about it and they'd see it and they'd call me up and I'd build them one. All done by hand. All done with wire wrap wire and drilling holes and plugging in pins. It was a pretty neat device so that was one of the neat commercial devices that we actually sold.
Tony Candela: Did Tim have a company that he was calling by some name, that these products were being sold under or was it pretty much just "go as you go, catch as catch can?"
Deane Blazie: No, Tim never had a company name he used. My company I called it Blazie Enterprises because just to come up with a name so that I could put it on the invoices. But Tim always kind of stayed out of it. Even when I started Maryland Computer Services, that was in 1976, I had just, well I was working for the government and a friend of mine and I, who became my partner, Richard Kramer, we both worked for the laboratory, the human factors lab. And we started programming on the side for some architects who needed some software to be done on the Hewlett Packard desktop calculator, but it was really a computer, desktop computer.
And I told the Hewlett Packard salesman that we could do that so we did that job and then another one popped up. We did that job. It just became a lot of fun and we enjoyed doing that more than our government work so a big job came up where we were going to bid with Hewlett Packard on a contract for the Social Security Administration and so my partner, Dick, decided that we ought to quit, instead of working for the government trying to do this part time.
So it was the week of July 4th, I remember, 1976, that we both quit our jobs and started Maryland Computer Services. I remember our boss at the laboratory thought we were crazy. He said, "What are you guys doing? How are you going to make money?" He thought we were crazy and we probably were cause at that time we had no contracts. We just had hopes that we'd get this contract.
And sure enough, we did get the contract. Hewlett Packard got the contract. It wasn't us. They bid on the contract with Social Security. We subcontracted the software part, did that work for them and in the process started doing other things.
Like we bought a Hewlett Packard desktop computer in '98. I think it was a model 9826. We did that to program some software for some other companies in the area and I remember, right around that time, Tim Cranmer called me up and he was Director of Technical Services. That was his new job. He said, "We can employ a lot of blind people here in the State if there was a way for us to look up phone numbers quickly. Because all the switchboards here, blind people could do those jobs, but we gotta find a way."
So we started thinking about that and we hooked, we meaning the company, mostly myself was doing the hardware work and another engineer, he was an engineer, Dave Ursin, did the programming on his desktop computer. I took a board out of the Speech Plus Calculator, wired it up to this Hewlett Packard computer so that we could speak the various calculator functions and all the digits. Dave programmed the computer to where you could type in a name. It couldn't speak the letters so we just had to hope you typed it right. And it would search the tape and speak the phone number.
We programmed this thing up and took it to Tim and showed it to him and he said, "This is great." I think the State ended up buying four or five of those from us. And he showed it to other people and they wanted some. Pretty soon it became a business.
Ten years later it was probably 85–90% of the business of Maryland Computer Services was selling products for the blind. We modified that program on the 9826 to become a word processor because Speech Plus, Telesensory, Jim Bliss in particular, took the speech technology and he refined it more and more as bigger memories came out. He was able to store the entire alphabet and a few, half dozen words, on one chip, on one board so we started using those boards to where we could spell the person's name and we could do word processing, on a letter by letter basis only though. So we hooked up one of those.
And by the way, that enabled Tim Cranmer to use the computer because once he could read the display, with speech, even though it was letter by letter, he could read the program in the computer. So he actually became a programmer and he programmed Braille 1.9. I don't know if you've ever heard of that but that was a braille translator that you could type in text on this Hewlett Packard computer, store it on a disk and it would translate that into braille and print it out on a braille embosser. And it was Braille 1.9. I think you'd call it Braille 1.99, because it wasn't perfect. It would do some contractions wrong but it was pretty close. And that's what actually got us into the braille translation software later in my career.
Tony Candela: And also the embosser itself, to physically print the braille, had to be designed, I guess, around that time.
Deane Blazie: And that started Tim thinking about how can we print braille cheaper.
You know I think back then, Triformation had the only braille embosser that I know of that was for sale, reasonably priced. Reasonably priced I mean $10,000. By today's standards it wasn't reasonable but back then it was the only thing you could get. So I think Tim bought one of those or some of those and used them but they were just too expensive.
So he said, "Why can't we take a Perkins braille writer and put a motor on it so that we can mechanize that and make that into a braille printer?" So we at Maryland Computer Services didn't have the leftover resources to do that. We were too busy programming the speech stuff and working on T-term which was the talking computer terminal that again just spoke letters. And then we went from T-term to Total Talk.
But Tim started in his laboratory. He had a great job because he was able to do all this stuff, using State money for State employees, for the blind in the State and so it was really a great job. So he could do this research. So he had Wayne Thompson was the engineer Tim had hired and Wayne did all this design of the Perkins. We ended up calling it The Cranmer Modified Perkins braille writer, CMPB. It was just a Perkins braille writer. You've seen them with a large plastic base and a motor to move the carriage and I think we added the motor to move the paper so it actually could put a sheet of paper in and do the whole thing. No, I think Wayne Thompson did that.
Anyhow, Wayne provided us with the prototype and the circuit, circuit diagrams, and the code for the RAM. So we ended up building those. Mike Romeo did all the productizing, the design to make it buildable and I'll never forget, we were trying to figure out how to build it. It was all made out of wood, the one that Wayne did with a wooden base and the keyboard was electric keys and electric switches instead of the manual Perkins keys. Those were mounted on a metal box.
So Mike Romeo, I go in there one day and here's Mike down in the garage, whittling out some wood with sheets of plastic. And he takes the plastic into the kitchen. Our office was in a house at that time. A pretty large house but it was in a house that we bought to make an office out of it. So Mike puts this plastic in this wooden mold into the oven and he comes out and here's a nice mold for the keyboard. I didn't know much about plastic forming at the time but it's called vacuum forming, although we didn't use a vacuum. We just used the heat of the oven.
Anyhow, we vacuum formed these key covers and bases and then we took them out to plastics houses and said, "Here, can you guys make these? What'll they cost?" So instead of using wood, we actually went to plastic. Which made a much nicer looking plastic. A much more professional looking job and it introduced us, that's kind of how you grow a company, by learning processes in technologies that you didn't know before. By pushing the envelope and trying something new.
So, the first Cranmer Braillers, I don't know what year they came off the board, probably '82 or '83, my guess, maybe '81. But they were really nice. They were neat little devices. Some of the troubles with them were that the Perkins was designed to be used by an individual, hacking away at creating pages of braille. Well, when people found they could get this printer for I think $2,500, maybe $3,000 what we sold it for, which was really inexpensive at that time. They started using them to do braille production. Hundreds of pages a day.
The machines just had various problems. They just couldn't stand up to that kind of load, although some of them did. Some of them worked pretty well but other ones we had a lot of troubles with. But it was a great product. We sold just hundreds of those things and hundreds was a big number back then. Just a great, great product.
But that was the early '80s.
Tony Candela: Was it natural and known to form a company? You started Blazie did you say Electronics? Enterprises. So I guess we could call that your first real company.
Deane Blazie: Yes.
Tony Candela: And then you created Maryland Computers. Telesensory had already been formed. Companies were forming up. Triformations was out there.
So, in terms of the way the industry itself was developing, I guess what you saw around you, other technology companies, this was totally natural, I guess, to do this, to form up a company?
Deane Blazie: It didn't seem really unnatural, but it was new territory. When I made Blazie Enterprises. I did it, I had a name and I could do the accounting separately, but I didn't incorporate, didn't file any paper work with anybody. I just started calling myself Blazie Enterprises. Which was perfectly fine because you could claim all the deductions in the income on your taxes and it all worked out fine.
But when you have a partner, you've got to do something different, to limit the liabilities of the two owners. So we did incorporate. We found an attorney, which was brand new territory for me, and we found an accountant and we set up this Maryland Computer Services company and incorporated it.
So that was different. It was new. Learn as you go.
Tony Candela: Now the contract through Hewlett Packard with the Social Security Administration sounds like it worked out.
Deane Blazie: It did. We made money on the project, enough to keep us going and to get the next job and to keep us funded. But it's a struggle, the whole ten years was pretty much a struggle. And I say that because most of the company's business was in contract programming where we would give people a price to do a particular job.
Not wanting to do less than a really good, perfect job, we would tend to put a lot more effort into the job than what we originally thought it would take. So virtually every job that you quote you'd go over-budget by probably a factor of two, sometimes three or four. Sometimes it was just awful. Yet we still had to survive.
We charged a reasonable amount of money for things so that we could be over by a little bit and still pay ourselves. Most of the time, the first year, we didn't take any money out of the company. We got no paychecks. After a while we started giving ourselves some paychecks but even after several years of business, three or four years, we'd still miss a payday now and then because we didn't have the cash.
Tony Candela: So how did you live from day to day, from week to week, buying food?
Deane Blazie: When we had a paycheck, I would be very careful and not spend it too quickly. Just had to be very frugal and know that your next paycheck may not be coming for a while. So it was a struggle but yet we still, actually the first seven or eight years we made money every year. I mean on the books. The books showed we made a profit of so many thousands of dollars.
But the trouble is, you didn't have the cash because you may have made say $10 or $20 or $50 but you had a staff and you were growing so all that money was in accounts receivable and in projects that weren't finished. That's where I learned about cash flow, which was an absolute eye opener to me. It was a real, real business education.
Tony Candela: Did Marty have a job at that point? Was that helping in any way?
Deane Blazie: No, she was raising the children. We had two and eventually three children, at that point. So she didn't work. She stayed home with them.
She did have a part time job once, at the local community college, for a year or so. But mostly she took care of the children.
Tony Candela: And your partner, was he married? Was Dick married?
Deane Blazie: Yes, he was married. My partner, he was married. He got a divorce after a couple of years in the business and then ended up remarrying a number of years later. But he also had money from his family, an inheritance. His mother had passed away just recently, around that same time, just before we started the business. So he had money. He could survive. So it wasn't as big an issue for him. In fact he ended up lending the company money when we really, really needed it. That got us out of a lot of binds and that helped a lot.
Tony Candela: You became your own venture capitalist.
Deane Blazie: He became our own venture capitalist.
But mostly we went to the banks and we borrowed money based on our company assets, our personal homes we put up on the line and the fact that we had Accounts Receivable and we borrowed money on that.
That really ended up getting us into trouble too. In 1994 [1984], I guess it was, that was when interest rates, our loans at the bank went from 10% they went up to 23%. So any profits we had those years strictly went into paying off these loans at the bank. We got into financial trouble. We had a major expansion at that point, trying to outdo Telesensory in the blindness business and whatever companies were there and we ended up, the bank came in and said, "Look, you guys have bankrupted the company. We want our money."
So they essentially read us the rules and the rules were that you show us a plan and so I called in our accountant...
(End of Part 2 of 5)
