Listen to Blazie Interview, Part 3
Deane Blazie (continued): Basically, the bank came in and said we need to come up with this plan, which we did, and the plan included laying off 50% of our employees. This was a really gut-wrenching time. This was my MBA degree. Getting through this was my MBA degree, which I never really got but that was my MBA by example.
We laid off half of our staff. We turned our inventory into cash. We stopped purchasing. We got rid of a lot of research projects we were working on and we focused on nothing but getting out from under the debt.
I think our debt was around $600,000 dollars at that time, which is an enormous amount of money for me. And we paid it down to $300,000 within a year. All of this was such a strain on our partnership. We began having, really, partnership troubles in 1985 and finally it came to the point where we wanted to split the company. My partner was mostly involved in the consulting end of the business, the computer-programming end, and I was consumed by the blindness end. The only way we could split the company, he was willing to give me the blindness business and he was taking the other one. The only way we could split was to pay off that debt. And I could not raise the capital to pay off the debt.
So finally, in order to make something happen, it was getting unbearable, he called a stockholders' meeting, convinced one of the employees to vote in his favor, and voted me out as President. So I figured well, I'll just do the blindness part and do what I'm told. The next day he comes in and tells me I'm fired, pack up my stuff and leave. They'll pay me two weeks pay and pay me for my vacation, which was pretty nice because we didn't have a lot of money at the time. So I left.
It was a very difficult time for my family. The banks were driving around our house, taking pictures. They were going to foreclose. It was a really tough time. But Marty, we both toughed through it.
Two months later, the bank, after they found out that he was running the business, they came in and they said, "Look, we want our money now. We're going to liquidate your company."
So I came back, the bank asked me to come back and help value the assets and help close it down. Because they had been working with me all these years. By the way, after they fired me I was doing consulting work for another client of ours down in Silver Springs, Maryland. Guy named Shelly Katz, who was a customer of ours, just a real, true friend of mine that helped me out, knew I was in trouble and he needed someone too, so it worked out well.
But I came back and after we were shutting the company down, Dick Kramer got a call from Lee Brown, who was the President of Triformations at the time, and Lee was interested in seeing what we had and buying our technology. So in the end, what happened was Lee ended up buying the company by paying off the debt and giving my partner his part of the business, which was the consulting part, getting me out from under my debt and that was it.
So we did it. We shut the company down. Actually, we transferred it to Triformations, who right after that they changed their name to Enabling Technologies, within six months or a year. And I moved on to just doing this consulting work.
Tony Candela: What did you and Dick fight about?
Deane Blazie: How things should be done in the business. Mostly, how we were spending our money. My side was that [the consulting] side was losing money. That every time we'd do a contract for contract programming we'd be 50 to 100% [over] budget and that we were pouring money into that side of the business and he was saying, "The blindness side is really not earning their keep either." So it went back and forth.
It was tough to tell for sure because 80% of the people were blindness and 20% were programming, people say. And yet, how do you ante up the overhead? How much overhead does who use? It's very difficult, accounting wise. We didn't have strict enough accounting practices to be able to say, "Look, your part of the overhead is even though you're 20%, your part of the overhead is 60% or 40% or whatever."
Those kinds of things. And we just drifted apart and didn't talk about it much and then finally something had to give. And he did the only thing he knew how to do. Of course I was really angry.
Tony Candela: Sounds like he did a very rough thing. Almost a mean thing.
Deane Blazie: It wasn't done out of meanness. I can say that. I know Dick pretty well and he's not a mean guy. He was a nice, decent, good guy. We were both up against a wall. There was nothing to do except something had to be done. And this was the only thing he could think about to do.
And in retrospect, that's what he had to do. He had given me a sufficient time to find a buyer and I couldn't so this was one way to get out of it. They would simply separate the debt. I would take half, he'd take half. Unfortunately, I'd lose my house and he had enough money to survive, so it was kind of tough that way but he had to do what he had to do. It turned out to be a good thing for me too because it let me go off and do my own thing.
Tony Candela: This would have been stressful I'm sure on your family at this point. Was it a genuine worry or more of a theoretical worry that you could lose your house?
Deane Blazie: Oh no, it was a genuine worry. There was no question in my mind.
Tony Candela: Especially with them photographing your house.
Deane Blazie: Yes. The thing is, all through this process, all through the ten years of our company's business, I got the impression that the banks would never take away your house. They'd have you sign but they would never actually foreclose. Sure enough, they will. They do. They didn't in our case but they certainly would have. It was that close.
Tony Candela: And you had good working relationships with the bank so when the asked you to help value the assets at Maryland Computers, how did you feel? Did you feel that you were going in kind of as the enemy or were you going in as a friend? How was that?
Deane Blazie: It was difficult I'm sure for my partner because the bank called me back. They had a good working relationship with me and I had shown them over the past year that I could, in fact, change a company, turn it around and pay down our debt, which we had done very well.
And we were continuing to pay it down, except my partner really wanted to separate. He didn't want things to continue, although we could have probably continued and paid the debt off. But he needed to get separated sooner so that's what happened.
But I was a friend of the bank and even though they were pretty mean, nasty people at the bank. They were really tough people. For example, I'll just give you an example, we had sales for about five Tiehl printers, $10,000 a piece printers, the big braille printers. And they were really a great product and we probably made maybe $4,000 on a printer. I don't remember but I'm just guessing. And we had these hard orders and I told the bank, I said, "Hey, give us money and we can order these printers and we can turn them around within 30 days and pay you more money on your loan because we make $4,000 apiece times five. That's $20,000 we can pay down in loan. But I need six times five, $30,000 to buy these printers first, so can we take some of our cash that we normally give to you and instead divert it? "No, absolutely not. Will not do that, sorry."
And I said, "That doesn't make sense," but it was kind of a bit of meanness there. And they're not supposed to run your business for you. It's strictly forbidden. But they can say, "Yes, you can have this cash or you can't."
What we ended up doing was Hans Tiehl, who is also a really fine guy, he went ahead and shipped the printers anyway and trusted us. He shipped the printers. We turned them around and paid him his cash and made some money. So it helped pay the debts off.
But it was a really tough time. It was gut wrenching but what an education.
Tony Candela: Some of the technology legacies from Maryland Computers, we remember the Talking Computer terminal as one of them. Can you talk a little bit about the talking computer terminal?
Deane Blazie: Sure. Probably the best legacy we left in the talking terminal area was Ted Henter.
When we made the T-term, which was a Hewlett Packard 2621 computer terminal, a big, tall thing with a CRT screen and keyboard, made to connect up to a computer or modem. We would buy those. We went inside and programmed, reprogrammed the RAM inside, using Hewlett Packard's microcode, which they gave us and we made it speak to letters of the alphabet, any characters that would appear on the screen, it could speak. Character by character.
So anyhow, we showed this on a market and got an order from somebody here in Florida, St. Petersburg Beach in Florida. So we shipped it down there and then I got a call from this guy, Ted Henter. He was a blind programmer working for this fellow in the motel business, the hotel business, down in St. Petersburg Beach, programming COBOL and Ted had some ideas about the terminal. "Why can't you make it do this? Why can't you make it do that?" So I'd make those changes and much like Tim Cranmer and I worked together on some of the devices. You know we need this kind of change or that change. Tim always called me Dino.
So Ted gave us all these changes to make. It helped him and it helped us and I think Marty and I were taking a vacation to Florida so I told Ted, "I'm coming in the area. I'd like to stop by and meet you." So I came by and I met him and we went off to lunch and spent a few hours together and talked about technology, generally for the blind.
At the same time, there was this, it's called The First National Search for Devices for the Handicapped, Johns Hopkins and Radio Shack. Do you remember that, Tandy? Well I was entering that contest with I think that terminal. So I asked Ted if he would mind coming up to Maryland and being the demonstrator of it, during this big show that they were having because I think we were one of the ten finalists.
So Ted came up with his wife and their young daughter, Emily, who'd just been born and they helped us demonstrate that terminal. And we got to be friends and I asked Ted if he'd be interested in a job. And he said, "It wasn't really in his mind to move to Maryland, where it's cold," because Ted was a warm weather person since his birth.
But after awhile we negotiated and yeah, he came up and worked for me. And that's how we got Ted up here. I don't remember what year that was. It had to be like probably '81. That was actually after we had introduced Total Talk, which was really the device he came up and demonstrated. And Total Talk was the full speech. That's where we took a Votrax VSB Synthesizer board and we programmed the text to speech part, using some of the work that was done at NIH. They had done a report on our speech program.
We took that program and made it work on this board and ended up with full text to speech. We introduced that at the Helen Keller, I think it was at the Helen Keller. Big thing they had up. I think it was in Boston. I remember the Helen Keller Convention. It was a big technology show up in Boston somewhere. That's where we introduced Total Talk.
And I think it was really the first, full speech, talking computer, available in the world.
Tony Candela: All the words were being said, finally.
Deane Blazie: Yes. It could speak all the words, right. Not very well sometimes but it spoke them. We improved on that for years and years.
Tony Candela: At least informally then, during this time period, you were tracking the development of synthetic speech. You at least saw the state of the art, letter by letter. You saw the evolution through this development report, coming out of NIH to the ability to now make something speak more in full text.
You'd been watching this. Did you get a sense of the engineering behind all this at that time? Or did you know why, at one point, it could only say letter by letter and what now made it able to say word by word?
Deane Blazie: Yes. I did only by taking a lot of time and doing a lot of reading, a lot of studying. I figured out that the only way it could be done with present technology was using a phonetic synthesizer like the Votrax. So that's what we ended up going with.
At the same time, Telesensory was working on another way to do it, which they ended up forming a company called Speech Plus, Jim wanted me to wait for their speech but we knew we couldn't wait. We had to go ahead and do our own so we hired a programmer called Z. Millstone, a rabbi out of Baltimore who wanted to get into the computer business. He ended up taking that NIH report and programming it into the Z-80 code and making it speak.
And when it first spoke, I remember it was totally unintelligible but I called Tim Cranmer on the phone and played him back a little sentence. And he said, "What?" Of course I knew what it was saying so to me it sounded okay. We improved it and improved it and improved it and it eventually became pretty good actually.
And that synthesizer had some real advantages. You could make it talk very quickly, without losing quality, which was one nice thing. Even the Braille 'N Speak loses quite a bit of quality as you speed up. But this one was very, very good.
Tony Candela: I guess the next stage for you then was to form Blazie Engineering.
Deane Blazie: Yes, probably was. There were some more developments, which we should probably cover in Maryland Computer Services. After Ted came to work for us, Ted and I, using the full speech technology and a new computer that Hewlett Packard had come out with that was based on CPM. It was the same computer terminal but it ran CPM inside.
And Ted and I wanted to make that talk, really talk. So we ended up going in and changing the CPM code and changing a code inside the ROM in the computer. And that's really where the...Ted invented the Speech Pad. He called it the Speech Pad, which is really basically similar to the way JAWS operates now. JAWS is a much, much refined version of what Ted came up with at that time.
But we had lines that would do Say Line, Say Word, Say Character and then Next Line, Next Word, Previous Line, Previous Word. All of that was devised on this keypad where it was easy to move around.
Ted's very good at human factors too and so he devised this real easy way to navigate the screen.
Tony Candela: So the Speech Pad was a key-like device that enabled some one to control the speech.
Deane Blazie: Yeah, it was a numeric pad on a standard keyboard, just like what you use on JAWS.
Tony Candela: Just like in modern days.
Deane Blazie: Yeah, except he's refined it quite a bit.
But I remember Ted and I, Ted and I worked really well together. We have an idea and we really feed on each other and really refine it. I really enjoyed working with Ted.
We ended up calling the product Information through Speech, ITS. We sold a great number of those because we had word processing programs for it. Most of the office things you could do back then we could do with the ITS and that was the old CPM time and if you remember, this was about 1982 or '83... and that's before the PC came out, IBM PC, which I think came out in '83 in the Apple.
So we progressed through the ITS and just about '85, when we were having partnership problems, the PC was introduced and HP introduced their version of it, which was their own proprietary hardware and we chose to go with the HP hardware instead of the IBM, which was a big mistake on our part. We probably should have gone with the IBM PC because it became the standard.
Tony Candela: At the same time, I guess, the operating system that Mr. Gates and Partners were developing was making that technology more universally applicable.
Deane Blazie: Yes.
Tony Candela: It just happened that all that was happening around the same time.
Deane Blazie: Yeah, it was a very, very changing time. They were both based on MS DOS but different versions of it. So we ended up using the Hewlett Packard instead of the IBM. And we sold a fair number of those before we sold the business to Triformations.
Another person I should mention during this time was Mike Romeo. Mike was my Chief Engineer all through, from the early '80s. Yes, it was 1977 or '78 that I hired Mike. Mike was not a graduate engineer but he's an engineer by training and a physicist, chemist and an optician. Mike knows more theories of science than anyone I've ever met. And he was able to design a lot of hardware. He did almost all the hardware design, based on most of our computers, except for the very first talking computers that we had. Mike did all the hardware design, and mechanical design.
He worked for us all through the Blazie Engineering, I'm sorry, the Maryland Computer Services time. And even when they shut down he was working at the time on the Romeo Brailler, which was what we were going to call it. That's what Triformations wanted from us was that technology, mostly.
So he ended up working for them and Enabling Technologies for about two years, I think, getting that printer to the market and working on some of the other printers. Mike is still here in the Stewart area working; in fact, he's my son's partner doing all this work.
Tony Candela: I see. And Enabling Technologies goes on and the Romeo Braille Printer has a sister, the Juliet, whimsically following. And now we know where Romeo comes from. It didn't come from the Shakespearean play at all. It came from Mike Romeo.
Deane Blazie: It came from Mike Romeo. Mike's getting married this Saturday. I'm going to be his best man. Good timing.
Tony Candela: Well, officially, congratulations to Mike. It's April 28, 2004 and we wish him the best.
Deane Blazie: I'll tell him that.
Tony Candela: That's wonderful.
Deane Blazie: He is one great fellow.
Tony Candela: Any other legacies, either technologically or what you pulled out of it in terms of the industry itself from Maryland Computers?
Deane Blazie: There's probably one other thing worth mentioning that might help some of the entrepreneurs out there that might want to start a business. When Tim Cranmer bought these first five or so talking telephone directories, he told a lot of people about them and we got an order here and an order there for 'em. And my partner Dick and I just waited for more orders to come in. Well, orders weren't rushing to our door.
So Dick, being a pretty smart guy, said, "We need a marketing guy." I don't know whether we advertised or we heard from a friend about a guy, just graduating from high school, from college, Mike Mason. Mike was a young guy, fresh out of school, no experience at all and we hired Mike and said, "Can you get these things sold for us?"
It was amazing the turnaround in the sales of our products once you do this thing called sales and marketing. I say that, partly, because it shows our ignorance in business. But a lot of people are ignorant when they go into business. You expect that if your design a great widget that it will naturally sell. Well, it's not always the case and you really have to work at that end of it too. And that's a very tough part because it's not, marketing is not an exact science. It's a real art.
But Mike did a great job for us. He worked for us for about five or six, seven years and just put us on the map.
Otherwise, it was shut down Maryland Computer Services and I got a consulting job. I was doing consulting pretty much I did it for the next two years, part time. But it was a really difficult time for me emotionally. I didn't want to have anything to do with the blindness business again I convinced myself because I had been hurt so badly in it and so I pretty much tried to keep out of it.
But every time I'd come home at night, working for this company, I'd still think of devices for the blind. I'd talk to Tim and Tim was saying, "We need to find you something that you can do in this industry." It was probably a year before that which I missed telling you was that Fred Gissoni, when Tim retired, Fred Kasoni took over as Director of Technical Services in Kentucky. Now Fred isn't a particularly technical guy, like Tim was, but Fred had a real good idea of what was needed for the blind and what could be done. He learned a lot and he studied under Tim.
And Fred had this idea for a product, a braille display that you could buy from Italy. It was made by, I want to say Tiflo Technica, but I'm not sure if that's it or not. A place in Italy made these braille displays and Fred bought a few of them and decided he could make a small braille computer. So Fred ended up making a thing called the Portabraille. It was this box with a twenty-cell braille display and a Z-80 computer and a lot of software in it written in Assembly language and a tiny little braille keyboard that much like, it was a lot like the VersaBraille except it was smaller, much, much smaller. The idea was to make it cheap.
The VersaBraille was a great device at the tine, widely used. We're talking here the mid-80s now. Widely used and it was just an extraordinary device. The trouble was it just cost too much money. So Fred figured out, he'll make one and then release the plans to the world, which was typical of what Kentucky did. They'd make something, document the plans, give it to the rest of the world and let people make them.
So Fred designed this thing and he gave the plans out to the world. And he was showing it to me one time. This was back before I sold Maryland Computer Services and showed me the parts inside. Because I was looking at it as a possibility to make things as a product. I didn't really want to get involved with braille displays but the one circuit board had a keyboard on it and it had a microprocessor and a memory and all the circuitry on it and the braille display would plug into that.
So I looked at that board and I don't know how much memory it had, maybe 64K or probably not that much, 32K of memory which back then was a lot. So Fred and I looked at it and decided, "Gee, you could almost package this thing in a box and just have a device, if you could get some kind of speech output or something into it.
And that started our wheels clicking and, in fact, I think we even bought some SCO2 speech chips from Votrax and thought about converting our software over to the SCO2. But this was during that 1985 time and we didn't have much money at Maryland Computer Services.
Tony Candela: How was the concept that Fred brought to the table, how was it supposed to actually work? You would turn it on and type into it on the braille keyboard and the display would be in front of your fingertips so you could see what it was you just wrote?
Deane Blazie: Yeah. It was essentially a more primitive VersaBraille. But it stored the information inside in a memory. It's really the predecessor to the Braille Light. It really is that, with a lot of work in between.
Tony Candela: And the storage medium for the first VersaBrailles anyway were cassette tapes of some type. Was the storage medium for Fred's device going to also be something like that?
Deane Blazie: No, it was solid state. We used solid state memories.
The trouble was, when you turned the power off on this thing, the memory would go away. Of course that was unacceptable. But it's still allowed people to compose a document, go back and change it and print it out and get a hard copy, without turning it off.
Tony Candela: This concept of the power going off and the memory disappearing must have really been the bane of your existence because with your devices you can't ever get rid of the memory, unless you try real hard.
Deane Blazie: But when I looked at that, that really was we thought we could probably use that technology to make a small, portable note taker.
And then when I was doing this consulting work, after I separated from Maryland Computer Services, I still kept in touch with people. Tim and I talked a lot and I was talking to Judy Dixon one day and Judy and I were talking about, she said, "He who makes the best note taker will rule the blindness industry."
And so we were talking about note takers and I mentioned Fred's box and things and we talked about what was good about things and what was bad. The non-volatile memory just never would work. The volatile memory, turn your power off, that would have to go. That would never work.
To make a long story short, I started working that summer of 1986 to make what became the Braille 'N Speak. It partially came from Fred's idea. That's what really spurred the idea in my head was Fred's. I don't know whether Fred did that on his own or Fred and Tim worked on it. I think Tim worked a lot on the Portabraille too.
I remember Fred gave the plans for the Portabraille to anybody that wanted them. American Foundation, I'm sorry, American Printing House took plans and they ended up making the Pocket Braille. I guess you probably remember that. They probably were about to introduce that when I introduced the Braille 'N Speak. That's a separate story.
But anyhow, I started working in the basement of my house on this thing. I knew I had to get the size down so I had a friend who used to work for me during the summers, a summer student that I called. Actually I met him at a conference on Surface Mount Technology which was a short, technical conference being held in Baltimore on the next stage in miniaturization. Instead of mounting circuits through the board with wires and pins, you would mount them on top of the board. It was called surface mount and they would glue themselves to the board with the solder.
And by doing that, you could make parts a lot smaller and eventually they'd be a lot cheaper.
So I went to this conference and I saw my friend there and I mentioned this device to him that I wanted to make. He said well he would be willing to work on that. So he helped me work on that. In fact, he designed the original schematic for the hardware. Took my specifications for a braille keyboard and found the switches and I gave him the processor we wanted to use and the memories. I gave him all the specs and he came back with the surface mount circuit board, which was the first Braille 'N Speak.
Meanwhile, I was working on the software for it, along with Phil Hall. I don't know if you know Phil Hall, [he] was a programmer who used to work for Maryland Computer Services also. Phil did a lot of work on the text to speech software. So Phil's task was to help develop the text to speech and my task was to take this Pocket Braille code Kentucky had done and to try to get a handle on it, how it worked and use it as the basis for our code.
So we all three worked on this project, just evenings 'cause I couldn't work on it during the day 'cause I was working and Phil was down, I don't know where Phil was at the time. He was in the area somewhere, working on this only part time. And my friend was working on the hardware stuff. So we...got together and finally I got the circuit board and I'll never forget the day it spoke it's first word. It said "Hello," and I said, "Wow, this is really cool." And I started putting keys in and making it speak the time, because I wanted a clock on it. Then I got excited. I got pretty excited about it.
But I remember talking to people and I particularly remember Tim was never that excited about it, which really surprised me because I thought he'd be really, really excited about it. But he said, "You'll probably sell a few of those," he said, "but it really needs to be a computer."
I still remember what Judy Dixon said and Judy also was involved in how should this work and how should that work? And she was very adamant that we needed a really nice note taker.
So I got this board and I started getting software done and finally, I guess it was about January of the next year. This actually came together very quickly. I was surprised but it came together pretty quickly, In January I went to a plastics company and had them design this case for it to put the board in and this keyboard. Well it was all on one board so, the batteries and the circuit board and I designed a case kind of wedge-shaped so it would tilt up, much like a keyboard's tilted toward you, you know.
And it had all this room in it. It was pretty big. It was probably as big as that Braille Lite 20, Braille Lite 18 you've got sitting over there.
And I took it to Kentucky. I don't know. It was probably March or April. I took it to Kentucky and sat down with Tim and Fred and showed it to them. They really liked it except Tim said, "Why is the keyboard wedge-shaped like this?" I said, "Because that's the way keyboards are and they're supposed to be, so your fingers hit it." Tim said, "No, no, no, no. You've got to make it flat. Watch me when I type on a Perkins braille writer." And sure enough, the keys are flat, they're not tilted up.
Well I said, "That's great. I can make it smaller that way too." So I went back to the plastics guy and said, "Can you fill the mold up and make this thing really flat?" I had to have that done quickly, I told him, because there was a convention coming up in July that I needed this thing for.
So, that was one thing where a sighted person had one idea of how it should be but when you show it to a blind person, yeah, you're not even close.
Out of this meeting with Fred and Tim we also discussed the command structure, which I think is the beauty of the Braille 'N Speak. And I'd say that most of the commands were designed by Fred Gissoni, in the very beginning.
But some of the navigating commands were not symmetrical. You know how the right hand side of the keyboard and the left hand are symmetrical for going forward and backward, on the Braille Lite and the Braille 'N Speak.
Tony Candela: Right hand key: go forward. Left-hand key: go backward.
Deane Blazie: Yes, and its line, word, character and so forth. Well, it wasn't that way. As we talked about these things, I needed new commands to do new things like time and date and all the speech parameters and all that. So Fred and Tim and I sat there and we started changing commands around and we made it symmetrical.
We came up with the Option command and I added tons of stuff to the Option command. And we really fine-tuned the structure of how it should, the command structure should work.
Tony Candela: Now, was the idea of symmetry something that was driven by your sense of what is right in the world or was there something you had seen out there that was already symmetrical in design and you thought this was elegant? What was so compelling about symmetry?
Deane Blazie: Well, symmetry had always been compelling to me. It always has. It's one of those things, part of my learning disability, you know, is symmetry. I won't go into that.
Symmetry is one of those things that's special to the way my brain works. If you know anything about obsessive-compulsive disorder. Everybody has a little bit of it but some of us have more of it. Well I have more of it and it's centered around symmetry.
But the idea came to me very slowly was symmetry on the keyboard and it's because some of the keys on the keyboard already were symmetrical. I think "Next Word" "Previous Word" were already symmetrical on the keyboard. And it's probably because those aren't representative of particular letters, real letters. And so Fred was able to use, you can't use braille letters. He didn't want to use braille letters for some of the chords that were commands. He wanted to use the contractions like a Dot-2 and a Dot-4. They don't represent letters, per se.
So he was able to use those for the movement commands, with the chord. Those were symmetrical and then some of the other chords were already taken up, like Dot-4 chord, I'm sorry, Dot-4 chord was taken up and A chord was taken up by some other command.
Tony Candela: Do you remember what they were?
Deane Blazie: No, I wish I did but if you look at the Portabraille, they're in that. I mean the Pocket Braille, APH's Pocket Braille. It's gone now but you can probably still get a manual.
So, we changed all that and just added the symmetry.
Kentucky might have incorporated these changes into theirs too later. I'm not sure.
Tony Candela: How about the notion of the chord? I guess we spell that c-h-o-r-d, as in a musical chord.
Deane Blazie: That really came from Telesensory because that was in their VersaBraille which predated the Braille 'N Speak by quite a bit. I don't know if they coined the term "chord" or what. I think it comes from piano playing where you play multiple keys at a time.
Tony Candela: So the chord on these devices were generally some keys in combination with the space bar to create the chord.
Deane Blazie: Yes.
Tony Candela: You only had a limited number of keys by design, and so you had to make as much use of the keys you had as you could.
Deane Blazie: That's right. It was a brilliant way to do it. I'm sure we would have probably eventually worked that out, but having Telesensory already done it on a VersaBraille, it was pretty easy.
Tony Candela: And the notion of a way of getting, in effect, getting into menus through the O-chord to get into the options menu: Did that come from something you'd seen out there already? Or was that something you guys had to design from scratch?
Deane Blazie: That came from my working with computers. A lot of computers had a lot of options. In fact, the Hewlett Packard terminals we worked on had an options button. You pushed that and it would bring up a menu of all the optional features of the terminal. So, I coined it "Option" and then the first one I did was "T" for time. I'll never forget when it spoke the time. I was really excited.
And we solved all the problems like non-volatile memory—we made sure the memory didn't go away when you turned the thing off. It was glitch-free so that when you turned the power on, glitch the memory. All that was pretty tough to do.
Tony Candela: What kinds of barriers did you run into?
Deane Blazie: Making sure...When you turn the power off, you can turn the power off almost all the circuitry. But you still have to run...You still have to have power going to, not just the memories, but the chips that drive the memory so that, when you turn the power on, they will be in a known state that won't cause a glitch to write something in the memory. In fact, we had that problem for a while and we finally solved it by a modification to the circuit. We had a separate battery inside, a little mercury cell, I think it was that kept the memories alive.
Tony Candela: Memory has changed over the years, I believe. I've watched the product evolve as flash memory came in. I'm probably using the wrong terms, but I have enough of a sense of the evolution of the technologies to know that the ability to continually store information has changed through the years. You kept up with that.
Deane Blazie: Yes. At the time, there were two kinds of memory. There were what we call static memory and dynamic memory. Static memory is where, as you as you keep power on the chip, you write the data one time, and it stays in the memory. The transistors stay turned on and stores data and the capacitors stay charged.
Dynamic memories are memories that work similarly to. They have less parts inside though. So you have to constantly refresh it. You have to constantly make sure you re-write that memory cell before it fades away, so to speak. We chose to use static memories even though they had less capability (they were probably a fourth or so as dense as dynamic memories). But we thought they would be safer because you could have the processor completely turned off, you don't have to worry about the refresh circuitry, and so we chose that way of going. And I still think that was probably a good way of doing it. Those memories are pretty much called random access memories.
Flash memory came out a number of years later. In flash memory, you can't...it takes a long time to write it. You can't write it instantaneously like you can the static memories. It takes a long time to write it. So you really can't have a person doing word processing directly into these flash memories. You have to have the word processing done in the static memory (that you can change very quickly) and then, when you've got the document done, or periodically, it's like a hard drive; you write it to the flash memory.
Tony Candela: I see.
Deane Blazie: It's very analogous to a hard drive except it doesn't have motors or moving parts.
Tony Candela: And the circuitries just became more and more capable while, at the same time, more and more miniaturized as time went on.
Did that affect your thinking about what you could do with the products or how they were designed? These evolving technologies?
Deane Blazie: Yeah. Very much. Of course, every time we were working on something, there was always a chip out that was gonna be much, much better. But, you had to stick with what you had. You can't be announcing a new product every year or every year and a half. I know the computer industry does that.
We knew or we felt you could [get] by with a change maybe every five years. But if you try to do it more often than that, you're just gonna mess up your own market.
Tony Candela: Yes. You drive your customers crazy having to learn new things all the time.
Deane Blazie: Yes. Learn new things and buy new devices.
Tony Candela: Buy new devices.
Deane Blazie: I mean, $1,000 or $800, the first Braille 'N Speak cost, that, that was really inexpensive. People loved that. But it was still a lot of money. And people weren't about to spend another $1,000 just two years later.
Later on it became a policy that we would try to make all our products last at least five years. A five-year life, consider that, after year five, you come out with a new product to replace it and phase it out. If you're gonna raise the price, raise it at that point. Try not to raise the price at all during the five-year period.
That was really our philosophy and it worked well for us I think. It gave people a sense of security that they knew, that they could predict. Things were predictable to them.
So, we came out with a lot of changes to the Braille 'N Speak. We ended up adding more memory. The first models didn't have a calculator at all. We ended up adding a calculator about a year later. We ended up charging for that too because we couldn't build the product for $795.00 and sell it, we finally determined. I guess something else happened and the price ended up $995.00. And that was a good price. That was a fair price. We could make money at that and we could continue to make software changes and make hardware changes. Like I said, we kept the products constant for about five years.
Tony Candela: This is back in the mid- to late- '80s we're talking about, these price changes. How did the purchasers of the devices react? Did they feel similarly, that these were good fair prices?
Deane Blazie: Well, the market completely changed between when I was with Maryland Computer Services and when I started Blazie Engineering. I mean, the market didn't change; the way I did business changed completely. I knew it had to. With Maryland Computer Services, our products cost in the thousands of dollars, some of them $18,000 to $20,000. To employ a blind person, say at CitiBank, which we did, it was like $20,000 just to get that person a talking computer with a couple of disk drives, speech, and our program. That was just a lot of money. So all of these devices for purchase; virtually none were purchased by the individual. They were purchased entirely by agencies for the blind—almost no schools bought them—and by companies. When I started Blazie Engineering, I had the idea that that wasn't going to last. There was no way we could...First of all, there was no way I could start a business and succeed [with] prices that high. Because I didn't have any capital. I had virtually, I had like $15,000 in the bank. Ten thousand, something like that which I could use to do this product.
So, my idea was to come up with something inexpensive that I could sell for under $1,000, and try to get into two markets that we'd never been into: one was education and the other was the individuals. Sell to actual blind people. Imagine blind people buying their own stuff! It was a weird thought on my part.
That's when I had the idea of the Braille 'N Speak and why I thought I could make it and sell it for so cheap a price.
Tony Candela: Did you get demand from the blindness community itself for products that blind people could buy on their own? Did anybody bring your thinking to a point where you felt you really had to do this?
Deane Blazie: No. I'd say maybe Judy Dixon, in our talks about note takers did, but still the thought was that most of these would be bought by the schools, agencies for the blind, third parties, almost entirely.
(End of Part 3 of 5)
