An Oral History Interview with Jim Bliss, Part 2 of 4

Listen to Bliss Interview, Part 2

Tony Candela: So you were telling us about the French company.

Jim Bliss: Right. Oleg Tretiakoff developed a device and had a company by the name of ELINFA and the device was called a digicassette which had a braille display on it, using piezoelectric reed technology that was very similar to what was used in the Optacon, the difference being instead of vibrating the reeds you could simply move the pins up and down.

And he coupled that with a tape recorder which was storing data, not speech or music but actually data which had a keyboard which you could type into. This was before solid state memory or before other kinds of memories so the tape recorder became the thing. So this meant with a braille keyboard a person could input a letter, type it and then read it back in braille or you could transfer information from other sources. You could have a book on tape that you could read in braille. It just opened up a whole new world of information handling, which was a very clever thing.

So we thought that this was a really interesting product and actually made arrangements to have Tretikov come over and visit with us and we tried to negotiate an arrangement whereby we would help distribute these and even produce them in the US. We came very close to an agreement but never could really nail it down to terms that were acceptable to both us and him.

And so, as a result, we felt that we needed a product like this, there needed to be a product like this in the US and so we launched a research and development project to develop what became the VersaBraille, which was similar in that it also had a braille display, a tape recorder, and a keyboard and became, I believe, a lot of blind people's first introduction to computer concepts in the US. And people learned how to program this thing, they learned how to store their data, how to retrieve their data, print it out, do a variety of information handling tasks with it and became something that was pretty widely used, and ended up being much more of a success than the digicassette ever became.

Tony Candela: I remember the time when the VersaBraille first came out. It was very exciting for folks who were technologically oriented. They just dived into this whole thing.

Did you experience the widespread acceptance of VersaBraille right away or was it an uphill fight to get people to accept it? How did it go from your experience?

Jim Bliss: Most of the things were somewhat pioneering. It was a better than uphill fight. But again, I think, the blind end-users were kind of leading the way. Without that kind of demand it wouldn't have happened to the extent that it did.

But it did become very important to a number of people. At that time, to make something a success really [required] application in the employment world, because most of the reimbursement from the government, and from private sources and so forth, was aimed at employment issues and the VersaBraille was a nice employment tool as was the calculator and the Optacon, with its attachments.

So a lot of things were being driven by the need for tools for employment.

Tony Candela: How did you find out about what the need was out there? How do you know when you go to develop something like the VersaBraille, that the demand is there?

Jim Bliss: Well some of it is pioneering: recognizing a need and then doing something to try to meet that need often results in almost a revolution within existing structures and existing things. To really try to recognize a need and understand it, the first step is to have close relationships with end users and try to recognize what their needs are.

But then the solutions are often an iterative process where you try something, have a blind person give you feedback, and make changes. And often in this field, because you don't have the opportunity to have field testing with hundreds of people, often even the first product that comes out isn't quite right and you have to be willing and able to make changes in the first year or two that will make it more useful, or make it useful enough to get more widespread use. But it's really a trial and error iterative process 'till you get it just right, before it really goes.

The other aspect is, you have to have a vision and a stubbornness or whatever to once you have an idea to hang onto it and to pursue it until it is right and turn it into a product.

Tony Candela: And you have that stubbornness?

Jim Bliss: I have persistent stubbornness.

Tony Candela: Were you always like that? Is that something your parents said, "You really do stick to things?" Or is that something that you discovered in yourself later?

Jim Bliss: It's probably true. Yes. I've been criticized for that.

Tony Candela: Or praised for that.

Jim Bliss: One or the other. If it works out, it's great.

Tony Candela: In those days, did you have a major flop or disaster at Telesensory? Something that you worked hard at, either you yourself or your group?

Jim Bliss: I think the biggest flop we had was when we tried to extend the Optacon into an optical character recognition reading machine. This is something that we did kind of in response to a competitive challenge from Kurzweil. We felt that the combination of something with direct translation feedback, like an Optacon, that simply gave you a tactile image of what's on the page, together with OCR and its synthetic speech output, would be an ideal kind of product.

We tried to develop that and we did get fairly far in the development, but had to give it up when Kurzweil had received sufficient programs and funding from various sources to allow him to actually donate the machines, free of charge, and there was no way we could compete with that because we didn't have the resources.

Tony Candela: So you were trumped.

Jim Bliss: Right. We were trumped. That was our biggest project that didn't go anywhere.

Tony Candela: I do recall when that was on the drawing board and Kurzweil got, Xerox was involved with Kurzweil, and the organization I work for.

I do appreciate your talking with me after learning that.

What other things do you have there?

Jim Bliss: Let's see what else we have, besides newspaper clippings of the early days. Here's a newspaper clipping from 1976: "Palo Alto's Company Product Lets Blind Read by Touch." And has a picture of a different. This is in the Business and Finance section.

Let's see what else we have.

Oh, this is a newspaper clipping from the Palo Alto Times dated August 29, 1978 about establishing the Sensory Access Foundation in Palo Alto, with the objective of finding jobs for blind people in various places.

The Sensory Access Foundation was really founded first, we got the first funding to set up an independent foundation from The Seeing Eye, which is a guide dog school in New Jersey—[they] gave us a $100,000 grant to set up what was called the Optacon Fund, which is a loan program for blind people to allow them to purchase Optacons. We set up a non-profit organization to receive that grant and got it going with the Optacon Fund, which was a very successful loan program, in spite of what bankers and other people thought would happen, it had an extremely high rate of payback of loans. There were very few that were bad debts and it was successful in that sense.

After the Optacon Fund was established and became a non-profit organization, the concept was [to] expand it into other aids besides the Optacon, and it became the Sensory Access Foundation to allow it to meet the real goal and mission of employment for blind people.

And the argument which was very valid is that that makes a lot of sense for government and individuals. Everyone wins because a few thousand dollars investment in an individual can often mean to a government a bigger return in income tax and other taxes and reduction in the cost of welfare rolls and other forms of subsidy.

So from an economic standpoint, that turned out to be very successful. A spin-off of Telesensory was that foundation.

Tony Candela: Is this the same Sensory Access Foundation that still exists in Sunnyvale?

Jim Bliss: That's right. In fact, Marjorie Linvill, John Linvill's wife, was the first President and it started back in those days.

Oh yeah, here's something that was dated May 1, 1981. The political climate at that time was that Reagan had just been elected with a real change in the direction that government funding was going, with the goal of changing the whole economy of the country by cutting way back on various social programs. The funding that we had up until then had been from the Office of Education and the Rehabilitation Services Administration and those kinds of agencies received very severe cutbacks. The whole direction of Reaganomics was in play, which had a very severe effect on Telesensory.

The first sentence in this memo, which I wrote in '81, was "As we all know, conditions have forced us to take drastic actions for the financial viability of the company, which" and then I go on to announce our first layoff of employees. That was a very difficult time for us because of the federal cutback that caused us to really change the company from what I would call an engineering-based company to more of a marketing-based company because to survive, we really had to really go out and sell and get revenues strictly from the end users, "on the backs of the blind," rather than the government kind of grants we had over that period of time.

Tony Candela: Who did you lose?

Jim Bliss: We lost a lot of key people. Really, the golden days of the Optacon were in the '70s, where we had an amazing number of MBAs and engineers with PhDs and master's degrees from top schools, a lot of talent.

One of the other big sources of talent we had were a very strong group of Optacon teachers who were very capable, top level, largely women though there was a man or two, who were conducting these Optacon training programs, which were highly successful. We had to cut that back quite a bit.

Tony Candela: At a time and probably to this day, when not as many women are in the technology biz as men, you were having to lay off some of the women teachers.

Jim Bliss: We also had some women engineers who we had in the OCR effort...the one that talked, the Optacon talking machine.

Tony Candela: People have told me that these women went on, some of the engineers, went on to other companies.

Jim Bliss: Some of them went to other OCR companies and continued to work on optical character recognition in the commercial area and in, I think, some commercial product development, as well.

Tony Candela: And as you were shifting Telesensory in the direction that it would derive more revenues, given Reaganomics, did you take on any new staff with the sales staff, at that point?

Jim Bliss: We did take on some other staff over the period of the '80s, and this was also a period of tremendous ethnic diversity development within California. And we were able to recruit very top-notch people from other countries who had immigrated to California, largely because they couldn't get security clearances for working at places like Lockheed and other Department of Defense places so we offered a possibility of engineering department employment in something that you didn't need a security clearance to do.

At the same time, there was always the challenge of communication and having meetings—I remember meetings I thought [were] Tower[s] of Babel because we'd have a lot of people [for whom] English wasn't their first language.

Tony Candela: Where did they come from?

Jim Bliss: They came from Asia and China, India, a lot of Pacific Rim countries. Talented people but not the same culture and not the same language.

Tony Candela: Do any stars come out of your mind?

Jim Bliss: Yes, we had one real star who was from Sri Lanka and became Director of Engineering and was key to the development of Optacon II and the development of some other products we had at the time and went on after he left Telesensory to become head of another company that makes sort of the signature devices that UPS uses and at some of the department stores when you sign a little [device].

Tony Candela: Did your interest wax and wane through these years, with the economic downturn? I'm sure this was probably the most difficult time you'd faced since at Telesensory? How were you doing during this time?

Jim Bliss: I felt that I had to keep doing different things. In other words, what really began [was] a transition from being an engineer to being more of an administrator and becoming knowledgeable about marketing and other fields that I wasn't really originally trained for. And at the same time, I liked that kind of challenge, learning other things.

It was also a time in which American manufacturing was having real difficulty in quality control. We'd buy a lot of products and ... they were fraught with manufacturing defects. There was a big challenge in trying to see how to deal with manufacturing and learning manufacturing technology so that it could be managed in a way to produce more defect-free products.

And there was a big challenge for the whole country, particularly from Japan, because they had mastered this ability to make products with very few defects, whereas the US companies were having that kind of difficulty and we learned that as well.

And during that relationship, sort of key to our coming up to speed on that, was the relationship we had established with the Canon company in Japan. It turns out that the son of the founder of Canon refused a PhD degree in electrical engineering from Stanford and we managed to get Canon to invest in Telesensory and the son was on our Board of Directors and he was really an inspiration and led us to be able to visit manufacturing facilities at Canon and learn a lot of their techniques about just in time and how you control a manufacturing defect and how you really manage your production lines at a level that would have been totally impossible for us if we hadn't had that connection.

Tony Candela: This was a time when American business and industry was being touted as non-competitive?

Jim Bliss: That's right.

Tony Candela: There was a lot of fear, as a matter of fact, about foreign markets, especially the Japanese. You at Telesensory were not immune to this.

Jim Bliss: No, not at all. In fact, manufacturing in the US and particularly in Silicon Valley, was an expensive thing to do. It wasn't like the low-cost place to manufacture anything. And so the value of what we produced had to be really based on value added, because the products were so innovative and were such in a leadership position that they provided a solution to a need or had so much value that we could afford the cost of doing business here.

And so that was an important kind of thing and the connection with Canon was very helpful in getting us up to speed.

Tony Candela: I would point out that this is probably the third or fourth major coincidence that you told us about that one can only believe in the power of random chance, you meeting a mentor way back in your MIT days, that lawyer that just happened to have that other patent pending. This fellow connected to Canon.

So there's a degree of combination of happenstance with regular world events.

Jim Bliss: That certainly had a lot of influence. And it resulted in some very interesting things happening. For example, when we had the difficulty in 1981 with the cutbacks and so forth, Canon became nervous about the stability of Telesensory. At that time the Optacon had been, Canon had been our distributor for the Optacon in Japan and they became concerned about continued availability of the Optacon to the Japanese population.

And so they launched a secret project to develop their own Optacon. And on a visit to Japan, at one point, I discovered that they were doing this, by walking around their lab and asking an engineer what he was working on and I discovered he was working on an Optacon, which immediately scared us.

I decided that the best approach to this was to join them because there was no way that we could sort of compete with Canon if they decided to do an Optacon. So I convinced them that there was some value in what we were doing and that we could help in their development and so we negotiated an arrangement whereby we could work together on a second model of the Optacon.

And that happened with Telesensory designing the tactile array and making the cameras. I always thought it was ironic that we were making cameras for Canon. But they did the electronics and packaging and so forth. And that really resulted in Optacon II.

Unfortunately, there was some not good design decisions made in Optacon II so it wasn't quite the success of Optacon 1 because there was one critical design decision that was fine for the Japanese market but not fine for the US market that I couldn't change but it resulted in a very nice device with a nice package and so forth but not quite as good as the first Optacon.

Tony Candela: What was the design?

Jim Bliss: Well they decided, for economic reasons, to cut the number of tactile stimulators in the display from 144 to 100. And they did this by cutting off the number of rows in the display, which we had put there mainly to catch descenders in the English alphabet, where you have a Y and a G fall below the line.

In Japan, there are no descenders in the Japanese language and so reducing that resolution from 144 to 100 was not a good decision. If anything, it should have been increased. It was true that it made it less expensive to manufacture, which is a good thing, but on the other hand it wasn't quite as good in terms of resolution as the original Optacon.

Tony Candela: So I'm going to do some quick math and say they changed it from a 12 x 12 matrix to a 10 x 10 matrix?

Jim Bliss: It was actually originally a 24 x 6.

Tony Candela: Okay. You're the engineer.

Jim Bliss: You need the 24 vertical to catch the whole vertical side. They changed it to 5 x 20.

Tony Candela: So the bottoms of the Gs and Ys, I figure, were not resolving well with the Optacon due to things like that?

Somewhere along the way, Telesensory and you really started to get into the optical end of things, shall we say? The cameras and eventually magnification systems. When did that happen? When did Telesensory and when did you first start [concocting] things like CCTVs, that sort of thing?

Jim Bliss: That happened in the '80s and it was really a result of, again, trying to keep a growth rate going with the company and with the revenues. We realized, because of the population of totally blind people, that we were going to be limited to a certain sized company, as long as we stayed strictly as a product for the totally blind.

I just happen to have a newspaper article here I pulled out which was dated Friday, November 6, 1987 which shows a picture, this is from the Palo Alto Times Tribune, that was the first closed circuit television that we had.

How this first happened was that one day I received a call from the head of Apollo Laser, which is a company in Southern California, that had been the original, the first company to make CCTVs for the blind.

The father of the CCTV was Dr. Sam Genensky from Rand Corporation, who was a low vision person that I'd met in the '60s actually. While he was working at Rand some of the engineers put together a closed circuit TV for him, because he was a mathematician. His neighbor had the Apollo Laser company and heard about it and he and Sam Genensky got together and they started making these CCTVs.

And this was in the early '70s and they realized after a while that Apollo Laser has been acquired by another company and the company that acquired Apollo [wanted to] get rid of the CCTVs.

And so I received a call from the head of Apollo, Dr. Burns, saying that they had to spin off the CCTV business. Would I be interested? And I said I might be and we eventually worked out a deal where they practically gave us Apollo Laser Company and we ended up inheriting the designs and some of the employees of Apollo.

And this paper that I have dated 1987 shows a picture of one of the Apollo lasers and me, showing one of the CCTVs that we had acquired.

Once we acquired it, we started our own development of our own CCTVs and that was really the beginning of our interest and business into the closed circuit television market.

And parallel with that, we had developed a product called, a computer based product sort of independent of all this called Vista, which was aimed at enlarging the pictures on the screen for low vision people on a computer. At that time, personal computers were just coming into play but they didn't have enough resources or enough power in the computer to do this kind of enlargement of software. And so it took a hardware device to do it and we had a board to plug into the personal computer that enlarged the screen and you had all the controls from the mouse.

The Vista, in its time, was an expensive but successful product. Then we were in the CCTV business, and that led us to design our own CCTV.

Tony Candela: What do you recall you inherited from Apollo? A model that people would remember?

Jim Bliss: I don't even know if I recall the names of them. At that time, CCTVs were kind of big and clunky and there was a big vidicom camera that sat beside a monitor and looked down on the page. And then there was also a sort of portable one that was nicknamed Shaky because you touched it and it would shake for about the next five minutes.

So, those products, while they were okay at the time, they weren't great products. And so that's what led us to try to design our own.

Tony Candela: I suppose that opportunity has to be there but you also have to be ready, willing, and able to take the opportunity and do something with it.

Jim Bliss: Yeah, and it just happened to be at a time when we were looking for something major to do.

Tony Candela: Do you have any regrets about opportunities that you should have taken and didn't take through the years?

Jim Bliss: Well there were some sort of forks in the road that we could have gone the other way with and it would have been interesting to see what would have happened because, to give an example, there was in 1981, when we were having the difficulty because of the Federal cutbacks, there were members of the Board particularly the venture capital representative on the Board who was ready to get out and wanted us to sell the company.

And so there was a significant effort to try to sell it and I had worked out an arrangement with a company that was in the hearing aid business and they actually came forth with an offer to buy the company at that time and eventually that offer was rejected by the Board, by the Telesensory Board. Simply on the basis that they didn't think it was enough money. But if that offer had been taken, things would have been totally different. I don't know if it would have been better or worse, but it would have merged us with basically a hearing aid company and it would have been interesting to see what would have happened. But that was definitely a fork in the road that could have led to different, totally different kind of things.

Tony Candela: At the risk of disturbing posterity, I offer the pun that Telesensory would have become Multisensory.

Jim Bliss: Yeah (laughs). So that is one. And then I guess the other sort of moment in time that was dramatic was 1991, when I left the company. And so, that would have been interesting, if things had worked out differently at that point as well.

Tony Candela: What made you leave?

Jim Bliss: Well essentially, I was fired, as CTO, as President of the company. I still owned about 25% of the stock in Telesensory and was a member of the Board as a result of that but the Board had changed quite a bit from the early days in that it was under the control of businessmen from different industries, particularly the food industry.

One of the key people on the Board, who became the President after me, Jim Morell, had been at Saga Foods and his background had been totally, for all of his life, in the food industry. And he had brought on another person from Foster Farms, the chicken company, and the two of them on the Board were having a great influence and it brought some people in.

And they had felt, and the Board eventually agreed with them, that they could really make Telesensory into an explosive kind of high-growth, big-profit company. And there was really no place for me and the approach I was taking, which was to try to develop the company in particular in the international market to make it stronger in the blindness and low vision fields.

So when I was actually setting up the distribution of the company in Germany, I spent a couple of months in Germany [and] when I came back, the Board had already decided to change and make Jim Morell the CEO. And at that point, that caused a dramatic change in the direction of Telesensory, which led to Jim Morell's tenure as President which ended within a couple of years after that and almost bankrupted the company because there was so much spending and no increase in revenues, actually a decline.

And then that brought in Larry Israel as President. And Larry Israel had gotten on the Board at Telesensory because in 1989 we acquired VTEK. Larry Israel had approached us wanting to sell VTEK and we ended up working out an arrangement whereby we acquired VTEK.

And in hindsight, I guess, to answer your question is if we'd done something different. In hindsight, I wish we'd never acquired VTEK. I think that was a mistake. And the reason being was, one of the reasons Larry wanted to sell VTEK was because our product, called the Vantage CCTV was basically eating their lunch. We were beating them, competitively, and we should have stayed that course and I think we could have ended up being stronger on our own.

But it always appears nice if you can vanquish your competition by acquiring them. It saves a lot of effort, and so forth. But the projections of combining the company and suddenly seeing it control the market and grow just never happened. Instead, what happened was that it provided an opportunity for all the other competitors to come into the market...none of the other people had really had any experience with mergers [or] trying to put two companies together and I think the lesson that I came away with from that was that it didn't make a lot of sense to put together two companies that have almost identical product lines. When you acquire a company it makes much more sense to get some technology that you don't have rather than technology that you already have. At least to me that makes more sense.

Tony Candela: Well I recall when it happened: Which model was going to be kept? Which model was going to be dropped? Because there were similar, almost identical models with differences that only people in the business would really understand, I guess. So it was on the minds of people who were observing from the outside, "What's going to happen now?"

Jim Bliss: And I think there was supposed to be a lot of savings as a result from having one model instead of two and the synergy of putting the two together. But in hindsight I feel that it was a mistake to try to merge the two models, particularly as quickly as we did. We should have just ran with separate companies with one owner and let them go separately, I think, at least for awhile. It's just like having two different kinds of cars in which one company owns both companies. It did cause a lot of disruption and slowed down Telesensory particularly and led to opportunities for other competitors to come in.

Tony Candela: Before we go too far away from it, you were in Germany for three months?

Jim Bliss: About, yes.

Tony Candela: That's when the rug was effectively pulled out from under you?

Jim Bliss: Right.

Tony Candela: You'd been away. Had you had a sense that this might happen? Were you worried about it at all?

Jim Bliss: No. I was actually totally surprised that that happened though sort of what I thought was happening was that while I was going to be gone I agreed to put Jim Morell sort of tentatively in charge, which I thought was a safe thing to do, since he was retired, actually older than I was and had sort of represented to me that he wasn't interested in any long term arrangement but was willing to mind the store while I was gone. Nothing could have been further from the truth, as it turned out.

Tony Candela: Did you take anyone with you when you left? Was there one of those exoduses of people loyal to Jim Bliss who didn't want to stay with Telesensory?

Jim Bliss: There was an exodus. It was a pretty severe exodus but it wasn't really with me because I didn't offer anyone any place to go to, so they essentially went back into more mainstream industries.

For example, the engineer from Sri Lanka who I had mentioned to you, he went into, first of all he started his own business and then went with some of the other companies and became a leader there.

Most of the other people I knew, a lot of the key people, left within the next year or two, as soon as they found some other place. The result is that Telesensory today, I don't know anyone there. They've changed it completely. It's a different company than it was when I was there.

Tony Candela: And what did you do? You found out when you came back from Germany, you found out that you had been fired, replaced, what did you do?

Jim Bliss: First, for a period, I tried to see if I could make my approach really acceptable by the Board and I felt that the Board had become what I would call "an old boys club." It was all older men, business men, and I felt that they needed some young blood and someone kind of different.

So there was kind of a stockholder's revolt, I would call it. I attempted to put two people on the Board, including myself. Three altogether: two new people and myself, on the Board, which would have given us a very strong minority position on the Board. And these were people that I felt could do a lot more to kind of contribute and give new direction to the Board, and so forth.

And it came down to a critical shareholders meeting in which we had a very close vote and unfortunately, we lost. Essentially I lost my Board position at that point because I had become a kind of divisive person in the sense that I was trying to push the company in another direction.

So at that point I said, "Well, I'm willing to sell my stock, as much of it as I can," and the Board was all too happy to make an arrangement to acquire my stock, either some through the company and some from various individuals, and so forth. And the condition was that I sell a hundred percent of the stock. So I accepted that and decided I would go my own direction, then started the company that I'm presently with.

Tony Candela: Jim Bliss Imaging Systems.

Jim Bliss: J. Bliss Imaging Systems.

Tony Candela: Is that the name it had when you started the company?

Jim Bliss: No. I tried to start it with the name it had originally and the corporation was the name Sensory Technology, Inc. And by that time, Larry Israel was President and he threatened to sue me because he felt that Sensory Technology conflicted or was too close to Telesensory.

I was in no position to fight that, on a legal basis, and I didn't want my meager resources to go toward legally fighting that so I changed the name. It was the easiest course.

Tony Candela: How have you found working with Larry Israel? He was one step removed from your removal. Did you form working relationships with Larry over the years or are you just acquaintances?

Jim Bliss: I would say it was more of an adversarial relationship, from the beginning. He was always a threat when he was on the Board, from the very beginning.

He had a campaign, from the moment we acquired VTEK, to become President of the company. And he finally achieved that goal after Jim Morell.

Tony Candela: Were there any other people up to this point that you feel had a really profound influence either on you or on the path that you've taken, that maybe we haven't mentioned?

Jim Bliss: Well there were lots of people that had influence.

Tony Candela: Name names.

Jim Bliss: Even starting back at the beginning at MIT, Bob Mann, who was a professor of mechanical engineering at MIT that got us on the National Research Council Committee for Sensory Aids and who was quite an articulate campaigner for the use of technology in the blindness field. He was very influential.

Sam Genensky in low vision, was instrumental. And there were a lot of people who are pretty much unknown in the field but were very capable, top-notch people in business and engineering who came from Stanford and other universities who played roles of vice president of marketing, and vice president of engineering over time that were quite important.

Internationally, we had relationships with our distributors in other countries and there were some key people there as well who were quite important in seeing the company develop internationally. The very nice thing about the Optacon as a product was it was truly an international product that worked in all languages, since all it was was a copy machine. It meant that it worked in Japan as well as it worked in Germany or England or France or Italy.

To give you an example, I guess, of someone who was key, when we were just launching the Optacon, we were visited by a blind Englishman by the name of Lord Frasier, who was a member of the House of Lords. He was also head of St. Dunston's, which is an agency for blinded veterans in the UK.

And he saw the Optacon and thought it was wonderful and immediately had us come over and give an Optacon training class and start the Optacon in England. That was one of our key start-up things.

Another key was a person in Germany by the name of Gottshalk, who was a teacher in a rehabilitation institute in Germany near Heidelberg. We had him come and spend a couple of weeks and my wife and two kids and I went there, teaching this class of Germans to use the Optacon and none of us spoke a word of German.

And that was a key launch.

In Sweden there was an ophthalmologist that was at the University of Lund, in Sweden, who sent his wife over to become an Optacon teacher when we had a training class at the Seeing Eye in Morristown, New Jersey, and went back and really introduced the Optacon to the Scandinavian countries.

Through that we were able to establish a truly international distribution system which was very important for the other products that came afterwards: the calculator, which we converted to various languages, and VersaBraille, and so forth.

We had, at that time, an effort with distributors that were really pretty international.

Tony Candela: Were your wife and kids involved in the business?

Jim Bliss: My wife was an Optacon teacher and she went back to San Francisco State University and got her credential, a master's degree, as a teacher of the visually handicapped. And after working for awhile as an Optacon teacher, and helping, she was really instrumental in writing some of the training manuals for teaching the Optacon and after that she worked for some school districts as a teacher of the visually handicapped for quite some time at the Freemont Uniplex School District in Freemont and has been just retired a couple of years ago.

Tony Candela: And we've met your lovely wife, Joan.

Jim Bliss: She's now a consultant at our local school district.

Tony Candela: And to jump back for a moment to those years of Reaganomics, I'm curious, there was a point along the way when that started to ease off. Did that period of time, in the early '80s, change things permanently, do you think in terms of how you viewed running businesses? Did you start to relax when the economy started to get better or from that point were you forever changed?

Jim Bliss: I think we were forever changed from an engineering company to a marketing company and from that point, before then, our products were truly, I would say, innovative and revolutionary. The Optacon was, and the...integrated circuits are really a state-of-the-art product, the Speech Plus calculator was the first development of that kind for consumers that had a speech synthesizer in one package, the VersaBraille was maybe less state-of-the-art but it was still an important step into the competitive computer field.

But, after that, the products had become more designed, I would say, from the point of being what was needed in the market and then taking the currently available technology and putting it together and we had pretty much by that time lost our connections to state-of-the-art engineering products that were coming out and were just using kind of off-the-shelf technologies. And I think that was where we changed.

But throughout that whole period there was continual pressure from the Board to have a 15% growth rate annually and strong profitability on a quarter by quarter basis and that meant that we had to keep looking for areas...to grow into and that's what led to the pressure of acquiring VTEK and really going into the low vision market and I think ultimately the Board would have led us into more mainstream markets because really the thirst for continual growth was there because they felt that that was how they could get the most stockholder value, the biggest increase in the stock is by showing that this isn't just a small niche market company but one that had fewer limitations on its market and growth potential.

(End of Part 2 of 4)