Listen to Henter Interview, Part 3
Tony Candela: The Apple II computer was emerging, now here it is the early '80s, not long after Bill Gates and friends developed the Disk Operating System, DOS. Were you aware of these developments, yet?
Ted Henter: Yes, at Maryland Computer Services we certainly were. But we were focused on jobs, in offices, for programmers and customer support people and things like that. The Apple II had no impact there.
But we were aware that they had some talking software and did some Braille translation and stuff like that. But we're so focused on the other end of things. The ITS was a talking CPM machine. CPM was the predecessor to DOS. Then the HP150 was an MS DOS machine.
And we're talking from '81 to '84. I went to work there in the fall of '81. Maryland Computer Services, and left, went back to Florida in the fall of '84, although I was still employed with them from down here.
I think it must have been about '84, MS DOS got to be more and more prevalent and the IBM PC. But the company was a Hewlett Packard dealer and we were very focused on Hewlett Packard products and Hewlett Packard, the HP150 was a much more sophisticated and capable machine than the IBM PC.
Unfortunately, it did an awful lot of stuff, if you were hooked up to a mainframe computer or a Hewlett Packard mini-computer. A tremendously competent computer. We made it talk, it had a very comprehensive screen reading capability on that machine. It's just that not very many offices were using them. By then everybody was switching to the IBM PC.
So our products, even though it was technically very successful, economically it was not. And so, some time along that time, around early '84, we decided we'd better do an IBM PC version. So we started working on that.
Along that time too, the Cranmer-modified Perkins Brailler was very popular so most of the company was focused on building those. The company expanded to about 80 people and we just got stretched too thin. And there was too much money going out and not enough money coming in so we ran into some financial problems.
Tony Candela: You mentioned something about the control of the speech function being on the numeric keypad. Was that a new concept or did that come from somewhere else, some other tradition and you picked up on that?
Ted Henter: You know, to us it was a new concept, because the TotalTalk terminal did not have a numeric pad. We used basically the function keys across the top. The ITS, the HP125 had a basic keyboard like we know today, with a numeric pad on the right.
So to us it was a brand-new concept, to use the arrow keys, like we do with JAWS, the Insert arrow keys that read by word, and things like that. So we "invented that" there. But I put quotes around that because I found out later, about the same time, that it was done by Triformations. They had come out with a terminal and used similar keyboard controls. So I think it's safe to say we both thought of the same thing about the same time.
One thing we did invent, or let's say I can claim inventing, but one thing we did, Maryland Computer Services we built in this concept of using the Insert key to modify the other keys on the keyboard. I'm sure we were the first ones to do that, pretty sure anyway.
And then we also built in macros. Other people by then had combined macro software with screen readers to do something: to hit one key and have it do a lot of things. So at MCS, Maryland Computer Services, we built the macros into the screen reader. And I think that was a first at that point in time.
Tony Candela: Were you aware of other activities along similar lines to yours going on out there? You knew about the Apple II computer and some speech software for that? Were there other activities that you're aware of?
Ted Henter: Yah, we knew there was a couple of guys doing MS DOS screen readers. Can't remember their names right now but I'm sure the young people knew about them.
We were aware of that and frankly, ours was so much better that we weren't impressed. But ours was better because it was running on HP150, which there were a lot more things you could do with that as opposed to the IBM PC. But theirs was selling a lot better than ours, so it all depends on how you measure it.
Tony Candela: Did you run into them at conventions and fairs and things like that?
Ted Henter: Yeah. Some of the trade shows. I had meetings with them. And there was a couple of attempts in the early days, I'm not sure how early, to get together and collaborate, solving technical problems. We knew guys like Artic were making synthesizers and later on they made a screen reader too, but initially they were known for their synthesizers.
So we did know about some of those but I'm not what you'd call an expert on those days and those things. We were very focused on what was right there, our problems.
Tony Candela: What made you decide to move back to Florida?
Ted Henter: We just got homesick. Mel and I just got really homesick. Wanted to be back in Florida, warm weather, the boating, the water skiing, the friends. And we made a lot of good friends up there in Maryland. It was like cloudy and overcast for four or five months out of the year, in the wintertime and it was cold. Issues like that.
Tony Candela: When was the first time you water skied?
Ted Henter: Blind?
Tony Candela: Or at all.
Ted Henter: I was five years old when I learned to water ski. My dad and his best friend, Roger Deakins, taught me to water ski. And so I grew up water skiing and then after I was blinded and recovered from the operation and the leg injury and all that, I decided, "Let's go water skiing. Can't be that hard."
Tony Candela: Were you in your own mind serious about that? You didn't think it could be that hard or were you just being a daredevil?
Ted Henter: I was sure I could do it because how difficult can it be? But at the same time I was scared, once I got out because when you're blind and you're moving, and I guess you know this, you're worried about hitting something. You can't see it.
When you're sighted it's not a problem because you can see way ahead and you know you're not going to hit nothing.
So I got on the water skis, I was scared about hitting something. I just had to realize in my mind, "Well there's a boat in front of me, well 60 feet in front of me. They know I'm back here. They're not going to run close to anything. And if I stay right here, behind the boat, I'm not going to hit nothing."
Still, all your senses are saying, "Look out, look out." The wind's blowing in your face, the water's rushing by. It's a sensory overload and it's all saying, "Dummy, get off those water skis."
Tony Candela: Do you remember how hard it was for you to get up on the skis first time, when you were blind, as that boat started pulling you through the water?
Ted Henter: Piece of cake.
Tony Candela: You went right up?
Ted Henter: I'm pretty sure I got right up and stayed up. Because I was an accomplished water skier and, as they say, it's like riding a bicycle. You don't forget.
Tony Candela: Now you typically have to stay in between two wakes. Generally, it's two propellers. Is this the way you had to avoid the wakes?
Ted Henter: Typically, you don't stay between them though. You just cross over, whenever you want. Even if you have one propeller or two propellers, still the boat throws off two waves, one on either side.
So if you stay right behind the boat, you're in between the waves. But the fun of water skiing is to go out, going outside. You cross over either wake, one or the other. You pull way out to the right and then you cut back and you jump over the waves, and things like that. That's the fun stuff and that's when you're going, let's say, on a slalom, which is on one ski.
The whole idea there is to cut back and forth real fast. If the boat's going 30 mph straight ahead, you can get up to probably 60 mph, cutting back and forth behind the boat. And that's part of the thrill.
And you jump the wave or cut through the wave, depending. And you make the sharp turns. You lean way over. In water skiing, to make the turn you lean way over. If you're going fast you lean way over and you're almost touching the water, just like when I was motorcycle racing. You're almost touching the ground. That's the goal.
When I first did it, the first time I didn't do any of that so I just stayed behind the boat, trying to get comfortable. Now I'm very comfortable and I do all that, sharp turns, wake crossing and all that stuff.
Tony Candela: How do you jump the wake? How do you know? Do you literally jump over the wake?
Ted Henter: No, you actually hit the wake. The wake is a little wave, you know. Maybe a foot high. And as you hit it, as you sense your timing cutting back and forth, you know about when you're going to hit it.
When I feel myself, the front of the ski hitting the wake, if I really want to jump it then I push off. You know, your knees are bent and you push off, just like standing still and jumping. And then the ski will usually get air borne, going over that first wake.
And if you do it right, you can jump all the way over, clear across the other wave, which might be ten feet away. Depending on how fast you're going and how high you jump and all that sort of stuff.
But if you're trying to do a slalom, which is make the turns real quick, you don't want to jump. You want to keep your ski in the water, cause that's when you're cutting the hardest. That's all technical skiing stuff. It's fun.
Tony Candela: It sounds like it is fun. It sounds like the more you think about it, the worse it gets.
Ted Henter: Skiing is a lot of fun, good exercise and all that stuff.
Tony Candela: You became a champion blind water skier here. How does one become a champion blind water skier? Is there a Blind Water Skiing Association or competition?
Ted Henter: Yeah. The American Water Ski Association, which is the National Association for Water Skiing. They have all the professional tournaments and stuff, for able-bodied skiers. They also have a division for disabled skiers. It's not only blind but it's paraplegics, quadriplegics, leg amputees, arm amputees, deaf. I think those are the main categories anyway. And they have competitions at least once a year for disabled skiers.
In the early days, I think it started in '83, we had some competition for blind skiers, as opposed to other disabilities. And then the other disabilities had their own tournaments and every once in a while we'd get together and have a combined tournament.
It was great fun through the '80s, I was competing, I think I competed about seven times in the U.S. championships. So I competed about seven times in those championships and I won six of them. So I've been the U.S. champion six times and three times in the World Championship in '86, in Norway, I did not do well there. I think it was '87 in London, I got a Gold in Slalom and a Bronze in Trick. And then there was one, I think, in Australia in '89 I did not go to. I was busy with Henter-Joyce, working. But in '91 we had the World Championship for Disabled Skiers in Illinois, I think it was. No, Michigan. It was in Michigan and I won the Gold in the Slalom, the Trick, and the Jump. So I won the overall Gold Medal for that competition.
And then I retired. '91 I won the U.S. Championship and the World Championship so I figured that was a good time to retire.
So while I was at Maryland Computer Services, from '81 to '84, I mentioned that I was accepted as part of the group. I felt very comfortable there and all that. And part of that was I had my guide dog, my first dog, and I would actually walk to work. I lived a couple, maybe three miles away. And I could walk through my neighborhood, I could cross down this path, across this little creek, through the cornfields and into this farmhouse, which was the office for Maryland Computer Services. It was really cool.
It would take about 40 minutes to do it. In the wintertime. So it's really cool having a dog but people there at the office would see me doing this and they were quite impressed with the dog and just felt real comfortable having me around. I was like part of the group, you know.
So it really made a big difference in my social life there, the camaraderie, just the good feelings at the office. It was a great place to work. We just had a really good time there.
And then my wife and I got homesick. We moved back to Florida at the end of '84, which was just about the time the TotalTalk PC came out, which was the Hewlett Packard 150 with MS DOS.
And I was doing tech support from down here and then also, because we were developing, continuing to develop that product and a spin-off, the VP, which is an IBM PC version, I would go back up to Maryland quite frequently, for weeks at a time, to work on those development efforts.
But we were much happier, Mel and I were much happier to be back in Florida, even though my professional life wasn't as happy. I missed being around the office, around the people, and all that stuff.
Tony Candela: Did Deane try to talk you into not going back to Florida?
Ted Henter: Yeah, Deane and his partner, Richard, they certainly did. But Deane especially realized that it was better for me to be happy. If I stayed there, I wasn't going to be happy. So he understood the situation and was willing to work out an arrangement where I could do a lot of the work from Florida. I'm sure I wasn't as productive, once I left Maryland. Just not being around the office, not being around the other developers and engineers.
So I ended up doing more tech support and more sales, really, is what happened. And some training. That was another transition but it turned out to be a very important one. Unfortunately, along that same period of time, the company was running into financial problems. They had undergone a huge expansion to develop the Cranmer-modified Perkins Brailler, which had reliability problems. Not only was it expensive to build, it was expensive to sell. Because once you sold it, you still had to spend a lot of time fixing it. So that put a real strain on the company and I forget when it was, it was '85 some time, I think, maybe '86, the company went under.
And so the products that I was working on were bought by Triformations Systems, which is now Enabling Technology. So I went to work for them, as a contractor/consultant sort of thing. I stayed here in St. Pete. They're based over in Stuart, Florida. So I worked for them.
At the time though, they were called Triformations and I had, in the meantime, when I was down here in Florida and I worked out a deal with Deane that instead of hiring me as an individual, they would hire my company, so I could be a contractor and develop some sort of reputation for the future.
So I started a company and named it ENTECH, and I said something like Enabling Technology for Exceptional People, something like that. Well these guys at Triformations, they stole my name, which I was very irritated about. Couldn't do much about it but I did have the good sense to get it, to register the name. So technically speaking, I own that name here in Florida. And so they squabbled about that for awhile. Eventually they bought it from me, once I realized there was no sense fighting with them about it. They bought it from me.
Tony Candela: Is that dollar amount that they bought it from you for, enable you to move forward with another business idea?
Ted Henter: No.
Tony Candela: Was not enough money?
Ted Henter: It was minimal. It was only about a thousand bucks, as I recall.
Tony Candela: Oh my goodness.
Ted Henter: But they went around for a long time just operating under that name and I couldn't really do anything about it unless I wanted to hire an attorney and fight it and all that. And I really didn't have the money.
So I think it was even after we started Henter-Joyce. I can't remember if they started or I started. They sold this. By that time I didn't even want the name anyways, so I said, "Give me a thousand bucks and you can have it."
Because I'm pretty sure by that time I'd already started Henter-Joyce and was off doing other stuff.
Tony Candela: Now most people don't know that the Joyce in Henter-Joyce is Bill Joyce, if I remember correctly. And how did you meet Bill Joyce?
Ted Henter: When I was working for Maryland Computer Services, the sales person in Chicago had met Bill Joyce. He was blind. And Bill wanted some talking computers so he could keep track of his company, all the data in his company.
He and his father had a cable TV system in Chicago, Joyce Cable.
Bill's pretty famous in his own right. His grandfather had been at 7-Up. So he and his father and his uncle ran that company for awhile. And there was a falling-out in the family and Bill and his father left. And about that time, Bill was blinded in an industrial accident, an explosion, blinded and partially deaf.
So I met him, it must have been about '85, '86 when I met him to train him how to use the computers. So I went to his house in Chicago a couple of times. He also has a place down in Sanibel Island, or did at the time. Sanibel Island is a resort area in West Florida. Beautiful spot. So I went down to visit him once or twice down there and trained him to use computers.
At that point, we started out with Maryland Computer Services VP, which is the MS-DOS version. But I think we switched to the VERT, because the VERT at that time was also a very popular, very formidable screen reader in the MS-DOS world.
Tony Candela: And Telesensory was selling the VERT.
Ted Henter: It was developed by Ron Morford. He was one of the pioneers, of course, and had been around quite a while.
At that point in time it was one of their most popular, if not the most popular MS DOS screen reader.
Tony Candela: Had you trained yourself in its use or had someone trained you?
Ted Henter: I trained myself, basically, being familiar with screen readers and whatnot. Once you learn one of them, it's not so hard to pick up the others.
So I was actually training Bill Joyce, on the product, and I was pointing out the differences between this product and other products and talking to him about the products that we had developed in Maryland Computer Services and I told him a bunch of ideas that I'd like to add to a screen reader.
So he said, "Why don't we start a company?" He was pretty well off and had a bunch of companies up in the Midwest, cable TV systems. When he sold one or two of them, he said, "Instead of paying the money to the IRS we'll invest the money in a new company." So he asked me to prepare the business plan and put together some design goals for the product, and all that sort of stuff. Which I did.
And so he financed the company and I ran it, managed it. So we started that in the fall of '87.
In that same time, another sidebar that kind of ties in, about the same time, Maryland Computer Services had gone under. Deane was working, doing consulting for other people. He was probably working on the Braille 'N Speak about then but it wasn't quite a product yet.
I was doing some consulting and training for Enabling Technology. And PDI, Pulse Data, it might have been a different name but I'm not sure, but they were looking to do something here in the U.S. So they interviewed me to see if I wanted to head up that organization. And so I talked to them but by then I was already negotiating with Bill Joyce, about doing our own screen reader and PDI wasn't interested in doing a screen reader. They wanted somebody to distribute their products, here in the U.S. And I think, at the time that was their CCTVs and their DOS screen reader, which they had a laptop computer that talked and a couple of other things.
I talked to them about doing that with them and they were also, of course, talking to Jim Halliday at the time. And they decided to go with Jim and they started HumanWare about then. I'm not sure that that was the name at that time.
So it was interesting, where our paths crossed. I could have gone on a totally different route rather than starting Henter-Joyce and doing JAWS.
The reason that I wasn't that interested, and they could tell, was that I wanted to do our own screen reader.
Tony Candela: What made you want to do your own screen reader? What were you seeing out there that needed doing or what made you think that you could compete with the development of a screen reader?
Ted Henter: Well, as I was saying in the Hewlett Packard world, we had done some really good screen readers. The ITS had a good screen reader in it. The TotalTalk PC, which was the HP150, had an excellent screen reader with macros built in and all kinds of other capabilities. And what we now call a speech pad, where you use a numeric pad.
And at that point in time, and also, that's where we invented the dual cursor design. I believe I'm the first one to use that concept.
Tony Candela: And will you explain the dual cursor design?
Ted Henter: That's where you have like, in JAWS, you have the PC cursor, which tracks the application cursor. And then you have the JAWS cursor, which can roam around anywhere on the screen and go places where the PC cursor can not go.
Just like a person's eyes can move around on the screen.
Tony Candela: And not affect anything that's going on on the screen, at the same time.
Ted Henter: So Deane and I invented that with the HP150.
Tony Candela: Do you think the fact that you were visual once and that Deane was visual, triggered or enabled that concept?
Ted Henter: Absolutely. Because up until that point, the other screen readers had a Review mode and you could be in the Application mode, but once you went into Review mode, everything stopped and you could read around the screen, but you could not enter any data. You'd have to go out of Review mode, back to the Application mode and then you could give commands to the Application, enter data, and stuff like that.
So it was really limiting as to how you operated the computer. So the dual cursor design was a big step forward. Of course, not everybody believed that right away but I think you'll see now that everybody has adopted that concept.
Tony Candela: When along the way did the ability to route the Applications cursor to I guess we'll call it, the JAWS cursor...
Ted Henter: The reading cursor.
Tony Candela: When did that concept come in?
Ted Henter: About the same time. Once we decided, "Let's have two cursors," then we said, "Once you find some data on the screen you're most likely going to route the Application cursor there, so." It was all pretty much at the same time.
But we did that in the HP150, which was an MS DOS computer, but where we wrote the screen reader was in the terminal part of it, which had nothing to do with MS DOS. It was different.
So when I was training Bill Joyce I was pointing out what could be done with a screen reader and how we had done it before with dual cursors and the macros. So he liked the ideas and he's an entrepreneur. He likes to start businesses. And he had money. So it was a pretty easy idea. "Let's do it."
So that was the first opening of that opportunity for me. But I had confidence I could develop software, because I had been involved in developing software before. I'd never actually been the main person before. I'd always been working for Deane, up until that point.
But I knew most of what had to be done and it was a new enterprise. It was exciting. It was challenging. And I figured, ultimately, I would never be happy as a blind person until I had my own screen reader because of the shortcomings of things that I saw in the other screen readers.
And I've been on that side of the situation, too. I've been a customer, calling Tech Support, trying to talk to them about bugs, trying to get them to make it do this or that or add a feature here or there. By then I'd talked to a couple of the other screen reader developers and I saw how frustrating it can be to not be in control of that development.
Especially back in those days, when the screen readers were very primitive. I'm sure some of that frustration is still there today, even when calling Henter-Joyce or Freedom Scientific. At least these days, the screen reading capability is much more sophisticated.
So it was great, having our own company and developing our own software. But again, it was never easy. We worked very, very hard. It was very difficult. There was a lot of stuff that we didn't know that we thought we knew. We got a lot of bugs and problems.
Tony Candela: Does any one or two stand out in your mind as particularly gruesome?
Ted Henter: Yup. We came out with the first version of JAWS in the summer of '88 and it was immediately successful. We were a small company, about three people. My wife and I and Rex Skipper, who was our programmer.
And even though I'd been a programmer and had been programming, if you're going to run the company it's difficult to be a programmer too, at least the main programmer. Cause I was also doing Tech Support for Enabling Technologies too. I was doing training. Anything to bring in some bucks, you know.
And my wife was managing the office, which basically meant answering the phone and shipping things out and taking care of the books.
So we came out with the first version in the summer of '88 and it was immediately successful It had the dual cursors and macros built in. It had a lot of the features that the other guys did not. That was our first version.
But immediately, that was back in the days when memory was a problem. The screen reader took up memory, then the applications wouldn't run so we started making promises, "Yeah we can fix that and fix that."
So we set about a more radical design, as far as memory management and made some unrealistic promises and put ourselves under tremendous pressure and stress and when we were just about ready to release it, although it was late, I think it was about a year later, actually. It must have been like '89, our programmer quit.
So I had to pick up the slack there and fix a few of the bugs and you know, the phone's ringing all the time, "Where's our new version? You promised it..."
We released this product before we should have. It had too many bugs. So we went from the frying pan into the fire, at that point.
Tony Candela: So was that Version II, is that what you called it?
Ted Henter: Yeah. JAWS 2.0
And so that caused just more trouble. We hired another programmer and he and I set about fixing the bugs and we eventually got it fixed. But we did lose in market share.
Tony Candela: Who was your competition at that point?
Ted Henter: At that point it was Vocal-Eyes. That's another somewhat interesting piece of information. About that time, it must have been the late '80's you know, we didn't have a synthesizer. The synthesizers were all external to the screen reader. And we were buying most of ours from Artic, which was a competitor because they had their own screen reader. We didn't like that because we were helping them.
So the guys at GW Micro were working for a company that had a screen reader and they were building a synthesizer. The founder of that company, Bill Grimm. About that time he left and Doug and Dan took over the company and they were building this synthesizer. So we started buying synthesizers from them, so we wouldn't keep giving money to our competitor, Artic. And we thought it was a good thing to help these guys get going with their synthesizer company. It would be good for us to have a synthesizer that wasn't an Artic.
But little did we know that they were also developing a screen reader. So we were helping them get started and it backfired on us, from a business standpoint. So when we introduced JAWS 2.0, Vocal-Eyes was gaining strength and became the most popular DOS screen reader was Vocal-Eyes. I don't have any numbers to back that up but that was just my impression.
Tony Candela: Well I started with Artic Business Vision and then went to Vocal-Eyes and didn't get to JAWS until the Windows days. So I was not helping your cause back in those days. I put that on the record freely.
Ted Henter: Most of us were involved in the controversy, whether it's better to have Macros built in which are now JAWS scripts, or was it better to have other ways of configuring your screen reader. So that was always the argument. JAWS is too complicated. You had to know how to do Macros. Of course our argument on the other side was, "Once you do it, it works better." We do the macros for most of the applications, anyway, you really don't have to touch it. It works out of the box.
But that was always the big argument between us and the other guys. Vocal-Eyes, Artic, or VERT. So it was interesting times. It was a struggle, a real struggle. We were fighting all the time. Keep customers happy, develop the software, keep market share. It was tough.
Tony Candela: What struggle did you have with the notion of the Macro from the other side? You believed the Macro was the better way of doing it but were there advantages to the ways the other screen readers were working that you really struggled, you really had a hard time deciding which way to go?
Ted Henter: I never did have a hard time deciding. I was always convinced that the Macros were the way to go. But I did see the advantage that they claimed to have, which was ease of configureability. It was much easier to configure their product than it was to configure ours.
For a given application, the user had a chance of doing it. With ours, very few users could do it. Very few users could do it with ours. They could do it with theirs. But in the end results, ours was better. If you had a skilled Macro developer or Script developer to configure an application, you had a lot more features, a lot more capability and the end result was better with our product than it was with theirs.
But what they were saying was true. It was very difficult to configure ours. But as you can see over the years, we've won that argument simply by doing it for the end user. It's not the sort of thing you want the end user to do.
Tony Candela: And just for the listener's benefit, an example would be...
Ted Henter: In WordPerfect for DOS: spell checker. When you tell it to Spell Check, it'll pop up a little box and I think the misspelled word is in red, or something like that. Well on the other products, you could tell it to watch for red, whenever red pops up to speak it. Well in JAWS you can do the same thing too but it was more difficult. You actually had to write a little what amounts to a little computer program, a Macro, I'm not sure what you would call it, but combine these functions together so that it would find and speak this.
But it was much more difficult to do that. It's a very simple task. The difference being we would do it, we already had that program in when we shipped the product, so the user really didn't have to do it. Because the other guys had it programmed in too, like WordPerfect. So saying that the end user wasn't able to do it, that wasn't really that important, because we did it for 'em, in most cases.
Now we didn't cover the whole world of computer applications, of course, but we did as many as we could. Like right now JAWS ships with probably 80 of these configurations already done. And that's a lot. Back in those days, they probably shipped with five or six.
That's the way a lot of industries start out. There's a lot of small companies all fighting for market share. And as time goes on, some drop out and some are successful and now, 2004, there's much fewer companies. And it's much more difficult to develop a screen reader nowadays than it was then.
Tony Candela: When did you become aware of an alternative way of operating the computer, such as the Macintosh and what would eventually become Windows?
Ted Henter: It was the mid to late '80's. I was talking with Deane Blazie, and he had seen one of these Macs at the computer store and he just said, "I have no idea how we are going to make those things accessible."
He talked about a Mouse. I had no idea what that was and just the way that it looked on the screen, it's a whole new concept. So it was very frightening, actually. And we didn't actually ignore it, but we were so busy. We were snowed under with just developing the DOS stuff, and the issues we were struggling with there and new applications coming out all the time.
So we didn't really start on doing Windows for, gosh, I think it was '91 or '92, when we actually started working on Windows. But it was such a huge step. It really scared me. Cause we were a small company and we weren't real successful, financially. We didn't have a lot of resources. Our programmer, we had two at the time, was really busy keeping up with DOS. It was a frightening time.
Tony Candela: And everyone knows that the code that's used to comprise the disk operating system is totally different from the kinds of encoding for Windows. At least in the beginning, the screen readers couldn't reach the level of the coding required to make Windows talk.
Ted Henter: Yeah.
Tony Candela: That, I suppose was the most frightening part about the whole thing: is that it looked like it was actually unreachable. Did it seem like that to you in the beginning?
Ted Henter: Yeah, it certainly did seem like that and we couldn't figure out how to do it, although we knew that IBM had done it with their OS/2 Screen Reader. And then we heard that the guys up in Canada had done it, Syntha-Voice. So we knew it could be done and it was a very interesting time. I noticed some very important things there too.
So we hired a consulting firm to see how number 1, intercept the data. That was the main thing is intercepting the data.
So the main difference between DOS and Windows is, in DOS, the data that you see on the screen, appears in a certain part of memory and all you've got to do is find that memory and go to it and you can get the characters that appear on the screen. So that's pretty easy and everybody knows what that memory address is. It's published.
With Windows, what you see on the screen is just a graphical representation of what appears in memory. And it's not laid out, the letters aren't side by side and all the same size and all that sort of stuff. So the concept of an off-screen model came up. It's probably invented by IBM. I'm not sure who invented it. But that was the big buzz in those days was the off-screen model.
Well Berkeley Systems, they did one for the Mac. I think it was first. And then they built a tool kit for Windows. So we had the option of licensing the Berkeley Systems stuff, which was the outSPOEKN. So we were talking to them about licensing their off-screen model and their intercept technology. And we got a chance to look at the source code and all that sort of stuff and we were negotiating to have the rights to this and that and everything so we could develop it and what not.
But I came to the realization that either we were going to be software developers or we're not. But we don't want to develop a product, the premier product of our company, and be dependent on somebody else's code. Code that we didn't own. Code that we may not be able to maintain. We didn't want to be tied to them forever.
So even though we didn't have our own, I made the decision that as tough as it was, we were going to develop our own. And if we failed at that and we went under, well so be it. We'll just go get a job doing something else.
But we didn't want to build a company or product line on somebody else's code. And that was a turning point in our success, just making that decision, that commitment.
So that was a key decision in the success of the company.
Tony Candela: Did you make that decision by yourself?
Ted Henter: Yup.
Tony Candela: Was it a hard struggle?
Ted Henter: Very, very hard. I didn't know if it was the right one. It was very difficult and Chuck Opperman was our programmer at the time and he and I discussed this many, many times and of course, he pointed out that if we licensed the Berkley Technology we would arrive on the market much sooner, etc., etc., etc. but I had to make the decision that we were going to do it the other way.
Which turned out to be a good decision, just fortunately.
And also, along that time, a little bit after that, I learned another very important lesson and that was, Chuck was from around here in Florida and was a good programmer, but he really loved Microsoft. He always wanted to go to work for Microsoft. So working for Henter-Joyce and going to the shows and all that, he met the people at Microsoft. Cause they were at all the big shows in those days, pretending they were doing something to help access to computers. And Chuck got a job offer from them.
So he explained it to me and even though he had a 'non-compete', I didn't want to stand in the way of somebody else's success. If they'd offered me a job, I might have gone to work for them at that point in time too. Because we were really struggling with the way things were going.
But I told Chuck, "Good luck. I hope things work out," and I gave him a good reference to the guys at Microsoft and I told them he was an excellent programmer and wished him well.
Now we had a backup at that time, because prior to all this happening we decided we got to have some more developers on this situation. So I had talked to Glenn Gordon, oh probably about six months before that, before Chuck left. If Chuck left in '93, fall of '93, something like that. Glenn Gordon is now the Chief Technology Officer of Freedom Scientific and was a CTO at Henter-Joyce and is the real technology brains behind the success of JAWS.
He was a friend of mine from the Maryland Computer days and we knew each other. He lived out in L.A. and I lived over here so we didn't see each other that much but we talked on the phone. Anyway, he's a very good programmer and we had worked together on a couple things from the Maryland Computer days. He had a full time job out there. He did a little moonlighting for us.
So I talked to him and he was working for us, part time. So when Chuck left, we talked to Glenn and he came on full time with us. I believe that was like the spring of '94. So he ran the project and a year later we released JAWS in January of '95. JAWS for Windows.
There's a very important lesson, the same lesson that Deane taught me when I left Maryland Computer Services. "Don't stand in the way of somebody else's success for what they want to do." I wasn't going to be successful if I stayed around in Maryland. I wasn't happy.
And I knew Chuck wouldn't be successful if he stayed with us and wasn't happy so I let him go.
And it turned out to have unintended consequences because a year later we did release JAWS for Windows, January of '95. And at that time Microsoft was getting a lot of static from the community about how difficult it was to make Windows accessible. These poor screen reader developers were having a hard time. Microsoft should help them.
So Microsoft came up with the idea of buying one of these off-screen models and making appropriate modifications and providing it as part of the operating system. Which on the surface seemed like a pretty good deal so they set about talking to all the screen reader developers and negotiated with everybody to buy the off-screen model.
Tony Candela: Did they talk to you?
Ted Henter: Oh yeah. They definitely talked to us and one of the guys that was in charge of making this decision was Chuck Opperman. My good buddy. So we had a leg up on the competition and we gave them a very good price. My understanding is, from the rumors which I heard later, is that our price was much lower than the main competition. I don't know that for a fact.
But we made a calculated risk. We decided that for X amount of money, they can develop it themselves. They're not stupid. So they could develop it themselves so we gotta get in the ballpark so we can save them that trouble. We'll get the money, which is better than a poke in the eye. We'll also get some of the prestige that goes along with it cause even though we can't talk about it and brag about it, people will know that they bought ours and word will get out and it will look like ours was the best one.
All these positive things to actually making that deal. So we weighed all these things and came out with the concept that we had to make the deal before somebody else does. So we worked real hard at it and they decided to buy ours.
So another neat thing that happened there was of course Chuck was on our side. He figured once they made the decision to buy a product he'd probably get stuck developing it. He was somewhat familiar with ours, because he had done a lot of work on it.
But along the road, when we were negotiating, we came down to the time to sign the contracts. But they're out in Seattle and I was here so we were going to do it by fax so I went to the attorney's office and waited and waited and waited and their signed copy never came.
So about 10:00 at night I went home, I got a phone call from the guy I was negotiating with and they said, "The legal department asked about patent infringement so we're doing a patent search now." I said okay. I was really depressed by this time, cause I figured it was just an excuse.
So I went to work the next day and everybody wanted to know. By this time we were about a dozen people at the company. A couple of developers, and everybody wanted to know, "What happened? What happened?"
Well, I had to give them the bad news that Microsoft cancelled the deal. They say they're concerned about patents, they've got to do some research but I think it's just an excuse. I think, forget it.
What do we do now? Well I say, "Take a look around. We still got our product. We still got our software, our customers, this and that. We're in the same shape we were three months ago, before the Microsoft deal even came up. So we'll get back to work and we'll take care of the customers, keep developing the software, just move on like this never happened."
It was a learning experience for me that that's just what you've got to do. When you have some failures or disappointments, you pick up the ball and keep on running.
As luck would have it, later that day I got a phone call from Microsoft and they said, "Okay, no patent infringements. The deal's on. We'll send you the contract." So it worked out terrific.
Tony Candela: So what did Microsoft do with what they purchased from you?
Ted Henter: Well that deal happened just before CSUN in '95, I believe. So when word got out at CSUN, that they had done a deal with Henter-Joyce, that's when it really hit the fan and everybody was mad about that. Everybody in the industry. All our competitors were very angry at Microsoft.
And I'm sure there was some other people too. That it was unfair. That they're giving us too big an advantage, this and that. I don't know what the arguments were.
I wasn't even there. I avoided CSUN for a couple of reasons, mainly that we were struggling to get more software out and this and that. The company was at CSUN but I wasn't personally. I knew there was going to be a bunch of static about this deal.
So Microsoft just got a lot of static. People were very unappreciative about what they tried to do so they pretty much shelved the project.
And we realized we were putting out the positives, but also I realized there was a lot of negatives to making this deal with Microsoft. That would give our competitors an advantage that they don't already have. They'd be using the same off-screen model we have. But Microsoft would have to do development to keep up with us, because we're continuing to develop it. They would have to continue to develop it also, but for us it was the number 1 project in the whole company. For them it was nothing.
So we thought we could do better than they did, however arrogant that may be. Because we didn't think they would devote the right amount of resources to it, and the right amount of testing, and the right amount of blind people and the fire of customers calling on the phone.
So we thought we could do it better than them so it was a calculated risk. Even if we're giving this product to our competitors, Microsoft wasn't going to give them the source code. Microsoft was going to have to do the development on it. So we thought we'd still be ahead of the competition, as time went on.
And as luck would have it, it turned out that they just pretty much dropped the project.
Tony Candela: Well eventually, years later, Microsoft built some sort of primitive, I guess, screen reader, into their software, for people who were complaining about not being able to read things during the initial boot-up process. Was there any sense that you have had that they used any of your technology to do that?
Ted Henter: No. They did not. That doesn't use an off-screen model. That uses what they call Microsoft Active Accessibility, I believe. That was another type of technology that does not use an off-screen model.
An off-screen model is necessary when you have to reverse-engineer the software like we do, even today, with screen readers. If you have what they call Active Accessibility built in, you can design the application to make all this information accessible to the assistive technology, like a screen reader.
The problem is, all that stuff has to be built in the Application, as you're designing the Application. That takes years and years and years. Even if somebody passed a law that everybody had to have this in there with new software, it would take years and years and years to get it into all the software that you use. And nobody passed that law. There is nobody who could pass that law.
So the success of that depended on the voluntary adoption of that concept. And that's very unlikely to happen.
As I say, it was only partly successful also. But that's the technology behind that Orator, [Narrator] or whatever that is. It only works in certain areas.
Tony Candela: How many versions of DOS came out before you stopped making versions of JAWS for DOS?
Ted Henter: I think we got up to like 2.3 or something like that. But sometimes we'd have a new version every month and we'd fix some bugs and put it out there. So I don't really know how many actual releases we had but I think the highest number was 2.3 something or other.
We continued to develop the DOS version, up until Windows was released and then the Windows release was so successful, immediately, that we saw the writing on the wall and quit struggling with the DOS product.
The other thing about Microsoft, an important point about Microsoft, on the service they made some attempts at making their stuff accessible. And they had a lot of static from the blind community and they got pushed into it. And they've had these meetings out there, in Redmond, trying to tell us what great friends they are of ours and all that.
But, I pointed out to them at the NFB convention in '99, I had a talk at the Computer Science Division and I pointed out that when Microsoft provides the access, like with MSAA. That's what they were pushing then. Then only Microsoft products will be accessible.
The reason Microsoft wants products to be accessible is because of the government regulations. The government insists upon it. If we allow Microsoft to provide the access, then only Microsoft products are going to be accessible, and they're going to be just accessible enough to meet the government standards, and nothing more.
And then all the companies like Henter-Joyce and Freedom Scientific and GW and Dolphin and everybody's out of business, because the Microsoft products are going to be free and it's going to be lousy and it's not going to work with other products. So that's not the result we want. That's what we would get if we'd continued down that path of letting Microsoft provide the access.
I'm convinced that the best way to provide access is for a certain amount of cooperation from the mainstream developers like Microsoft and IBM, but to have a viable, competitive marketplace with a variety of developers like we have now. Maybe a few more would be useful, but certainly you need competition, you need the choice, and you don't want it all in the hands of the people at Microsoft.
Even today, some people in our industry are pushing for Microsoft to provide it. They don't see the big picture there. Once it's in their hands then we're all SOL.
Tony Candela: Were there ever thoughts and maybe this was not actually a realistic idea but were there thoughts of writing a JAWS for Macintosh?
Ted Henter: Yes. We've approached that question frequently. And we always come to the same conclusion that in something like 10% of the desktops are MAC and it just never was worth it, from a business viewpoint, for us to do.
There's a whole world out there still, now we've made inroads to the rest of the world. But back in the early days, all we had was English. It wasn't until the late '90's, early 21st century we started doing these other languages. Now JAWS is in about 18 different languages and soon to be in Cantonese and already in a certain Japanese dialect and Arabic. All the European languages. So there's still challenges out there and hurdles. We're under the belief, or impression, that even though maybe 10% of the market is MAC. That's the guys that are doing the graphical drawings. The scientists and engineers and the architects and the artists, that's where the Macs are very strong.
And when you're looking up database information and doing spreadsheets and browsing the Internet, then you've got a Windows product sitting there. And if you don't, you can get one pretty cheap. It's just not economically feasible.
Tony Candela: You began with products that were using Hewlett Packard technologies. 'The operating systems were not DOS and not Windows, back in those days. But once you formed Henter-Joyce and produced JAWS, you stayed pretty much with the Microsoft products. It's either DOS or Windows.
Ted Henter: At that point Windows was clearly the dominant product and that's what we needed to do, and we couldn't do more than one so that was the obvious one.
But then also, the Macintosh, excuse me, the Hewlett Packards, they'd all pretty much gone to running Windows as well. Whereas in the mid-'80's, although they would run MS DOS, they also had I think it was their own operating system on top of MS DOS. And that's where we built the screen reader. That product never gained wide-ranging acceptance like DOS and Windows did.
Tony Candela: Most of us end users, when Windows version 3X came out, were in a big panic. So your first job for Windows was for 3.1. And then came the Microsoft onslaught, it seemed every other year, every two or three years, a new version: Windows 95, Windows 98, etc., etc. This must have caused you folks to have to run very fast to keep up. What was that like?
Ted Henter: It's a never-ending treadmill. January of '95 we released JAWS 1.0 for Windows, and it was Windows 3.1 so I think it was later that year that Windows 95 came out. And that had significant technological advantages, a different look and feel.
But we weren't ready for it when it came out. It probably wasn't until winter of '96, I'm not sure, that we had the Windows 95 screen reader.
But it was very disconcerting, very difficult to deal with. Cause we finally got the Windows product and now they changed the whole thing. And here we are we still have people calling up. "I'm losing my job because I need Windows '95...
(End of Part 3 of 5)
