Listen to Henter Interview, Part 4
Tony Candela: Were there significant differences in how the screen reader reached the level of code to work with Windows 95 that were different from Windows 3.1?
Ted Henter: Yes. There were some significant technical differences which required a lot of redesign on the part of the screen reader. I can't remember what they are right now. Something about 16-bit versus 32-bit, as I recall, which required a lot of changes there. Of course, the screen looked different and you operated it differently. You had the concept of the Start menu and the Desktop, I believe. Whereas before, we had some kind of menu where you could get to the other applications.
So there was a lot of differences and a lot of new things that you had to program for. When it looks different, it is different internally, so then you've got to design the screen reader to "understand" what it's seeing and what to speak and what not to speak. It was a big difference.
Tony Candela: Those of us who use Windows, somewhere along the way (most of us can't remember now) had to learn about the controls built into Windows, the tab, the way of getting to menus, and all sorts of things like that. Was that a change from 3.1 to 95?
Ted Henter: Yes. It sure was.
Tony Candela: They introduced the controls as well.
Ted Henter: I think the alt key brought up the menu bar in both cases. I don't recall too much about it right now myself. The tab key would go to different controls, but I think there was some differences in dialogue boxes and certainly multi-paned dialogues...but 95 had a lot of different controls. You know, the edit box, and the list-view, and the tree-view. All those things. Some of those were in Windows 3.1, but there were a bunch of new ones in 95 that we had to design for. Like Windows Explorer, that concept was new and different.
And all those little things, a sighted person could adapt to it, no problem, because it's obvious. All right, it's a little different position, it's one above the other instead of side by side, or whatever the case may be. If you're sighted, it's no big deal.
But if you're a screen reader, it's got to be completely redesigned in order to understand what's going on.
Tony Candela: Was there a panic at Henter-Joyce during this period? Did you have a sense that with a lot of work you'd be able to catch up or were you at a loss as to what to do?
Ted Henter: No, at that point we had already made Windows 3.1 talk. So by then we were really feeling good and sales were going up, sales were increasing all the time. So the company was making a lot of money. We were gaining customers. We were gaining market share. So we felt very good. And we knew we've done one Windows, we can do another one.
It wasn't 100% different, going from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95. Just some significant changes that required reprogramming. So we'd already done Windows 3.1. We were more than confident we could do Windows 95, and beyond that.
And so there was a great feeling of confidence at the company in those days, because we were seeing some signs of success.
Tony Candela: There were a lot of us out there who were breathing sighs of relief, during this period. There was panic out in the rest of the world, as you know.
Ted Henter: Yes. Well I think it's indicative of the times in that late spring of '95, we actually put out a new version, with some major bug fixes and in the release notes we said, "Now here's a version that will last more than a couple of hours, without crashing."
Tony Candela: And no one was laughing either. Dead serious.
Ted Henter: Eric Damery reminded me of that just recently, that we actually put out something like that in the release notes.
Tony Candela: Speaking of Eric Damery, when did he join the group? He's been an incredible voice for the software, for the company, a trainer.
Ted Henter: Yeah, he's one of the key reasons of our success at Henter-Joyce. He joined the company in about '93, I think it was. And I'll tell you a story about that. We'd had a lady sales person who seemed like a real genius. But she was part genius and part crazy. And initially I only saw the genius part, but I started hearing from the customers how crazy she was.
So we had a few problems with this lady and eventually I fired her. A very difficult moment face to face. She wasn't happy about it but I was adamant and she stomped out. And that was our one and only sales person and I was sick and tired of dealing with sales people. Because that was my main experience, right there.
So about two days later, Eric walks in. "Arkenstone told me to come see you. I'm looking for a job." About the third thing I said after, "Hi, how are you doing," I said, "Well, we don't want any sales people." And I explained to him why.
So we sat and talked, he stuck around and we talked. And by the end of our discussion I said, "Come back and see me in a couple of weeks. Maybe I'll change my mind."
Cause he had called Arkenstone. His dad is blind. And his dad had gotten an OpenBook reading machine from the VA. And they live here in St. Petersburg and Eric was selling software, not assistive technology but other stuff. He saw this thing and it was really cool and he called Arkenstone, wanting to work for them.
And that's when he found out that Henter-Joyce was in town and we were the dealer for Arkenstone. So that's when he came to see me.
Well a couple of weeks later, he came back and by then I had gotten over the experience with the sales person. And we started talking and of course he's a very likeable guy. Shortly thereafter, we hired him. And that, of course, was a major step up in our sales effort. Cause up until then I was doing most of the sales and I was a terrible sales person. I spent most of my time in the office, doing Tech Support, and not selling.
And that was another significant step in the company. JAWS for DOS wasn't doing that well. Wasn't making a lot of money. We were struggling to develop JAWS for Windows but this was early '90's now, before JAWS for Windows came out.
And we saw Arkenstone as a chance to make some money, selling this OpenBook. So when Eric joined, we set out a plan and strategy to cover the state of Florida and maybe other parts of the Southeast, I forget. And worked real hard at it. And we had a significant increase in sales for this territory for the OpenBook.
But we could see, being a dealer, we weren't making that much money. We were selling a whole lot of OpenBooks but we weren't making a lot of money. If we had sold that many JAWS, we'd be making more money, and we'd have repeat business that we could rely on.
Along about that time, and it may not have been till after JAWS for Windows came out, but we looked for ways to just focus on our own software and drop being a dealer. Because at that time, we were also a dealer for the Braille 'N Speaks, for the Blazie products. By now, Blazie Engineering was up and running. They started around '86 or '87. The Braille 'N Speak came out in '87, I believe. It was a very successful product. Everybody wanted to buy it so if you were a dealer for Braille 'N Speaks, you had to sell them cheap because people go out and bid and everybody would bid on it and you'd just have to cut the price to get the business. So we weren't making any money on them either.
And things like that started happening with the OpenBook, as well. So we began to see that the only way to make any money in this business is to develop our own products. Especially in software because it cost a lot of money to make the first one, but the second, third, fourth and fifth are real cheap.
So we began to understand how business works. At least I did. That helped to make the business successful in the future. It was a good learning experience there. But Eric was a significant addition to the company. That understanding of sales and customer relations and all that.
Plus he's very good technically. He's not a programmer but he understands technology very well and he understands it better than most blind users do. So he's very good at things like product management.
Tony Candela: When did Eric start doing, and I know he's not doing it now, but when did he start doing the long stretch of tutorials?
Ted Henter: Right away. See I had been doing, I had started doing tutorials way back at Maryland Computer Services, when we had like the TotalTalk. I took a little tape recorder, went into an office, shut the door and started recording how to use it. Very primitive, but effective.
So through the JAWS for DOS days, I did the training tapes myself, usually sitting at my desk in the office.
But when JAWS for Windows came out, I believe it was Eric and I that did the first tapes for that. Because he was on board. He was involved in the development of the product, from user standpoint, user interface standpoint. I'm 90% certain that he and I were the ones on the first JAWS for Windows tapes.
And that was great. We went into a studio, a professional studio for the first time. And we've had a lot of good comments about those tapes.
And then after awhile, I don't know what I was doing, I was doing something else, but Eric started doing them on his own, and did a great job.
Tony Candela: Windows 98 came along and you must have had to make even more changes.
Ted Henter: Yup. Not as many changes though. That was a lot of window dressing, I think, from 95 to 98. I'm not real sure. It's been awhile and I don't know the technology that well, so. There was some cosmetic changes and new things that we had to develop for it but I believe that when 98 came out, we actually had JAWS for Windows working with it, when it was released. And that was a historical occasion.
Tony Candela: And how did that come about?
Ted Henter: By then we'd been through the contact with Microsoft with the off-screen model. By then our product was, I think it's safe to say that the number 1 product in the market. I'm sure you'd get some argument on that but I would bet that we were the most popular product in the market at that point in time.
So we were getting more notice from Microsoft, more cooperation from Microsoft, all that sort of stuff. And we had Glenn Gordon on the staff, going full steam, working like mad so him and his development team, which by then we had a few other programmers as well, were very focused on remaining number 1 and making history by having a screen reader that actually worked when the operating system version came out. That was the first time that ever happened, as far as I can tell. And just because we got a bit of a head start on it, which had not happened before.
But another funny thing, back in those days, the early '90's, we were really struggling. This was like '92 now, '93. Trying to build software, managing a business and all this kind of stuff. It's not easy, so I was stressed out, frustrated, and almost depressed. And I was on the Board of Abilities of Florida, which is a training center for disabled people, here in St. Pete.
And there were a lot of people on the Board and I met this guy who was a retired Human Resources manager for a couple of big companies, like Paradyne and Honeywell. And I was the only blind guy on the Board and he introduced himself, offered me a ride home. At that point I was back in the office. And his name was Jerry Bowman.
And we got to talking and I started telling him all these problems I was having with Personnel and how frustrated I was and how difficult it was to develop software. And him and his Human Resources experience, he said, "Look. I'll come in and I'll take a look around your company," at that point about seven or eight people, "and I'll talk to them and I'll let you know what I think you ought to do. It won't cost you nothing. I'll do it for free. Then if you want to do it, then you can pay me to come in and do it." So I said, "Shoot, what do we have to lose. Let's do that."
So he came in, interviewed the people, gave me a report, told me what had to be done. His advice was to fire about half of the people, which we did. Fired some and hired others and that was a turning point in the company. Cause now we finally had some expertise in that area. I mean the company did, not me, but the company.
Cause this guy, Jerry, he remained as a consultant and eventually became our Chief Operating Officer and took the company from about eight people up to about 78 people, when we sold the company.
So he was a part-time consultant, initially, and I think from about '97 to 2000 he was the Chief Operating Officer in charge of all the hiring and firing and the personnel stuff and you could say ran the company. So he was another key figure, along with Eric Damery and Glenn Gordon.
Tony Candela: What were some of the reasons why the company needed to expand so much, from 8 to 78, over the years?
Ted Henter: When JAWS for Windows came out, things started to take off in the sales department and we started making a lot of money and we knew that you just can't take the money and go to Rio de Janeiro. You've got to keep developing software. Cause the challenges weren't going to get any less. So we hired more developers, we hired more sales people, we hired more tech support people. And also, by the year 2000 we had close to 20 developers and maybe 15 tech support people and about that many sales people.
So when the money starts coming in, we continued to reinvest in the products and that created more money and so we just kept going that way and the company grew.
And with those extra resources, all those developers, they weren't just sitting there figuring out MS DOS problems, they were continually developing new solutions, new and better solutions for not only the applications, like Microsoft Office, which is a very complicated suite of products but also the new operating systems that came out and the different languages.
And about those two subjects, the operating systems, see all this time we've been talking about what you would call the personal versions of Windows, 3.1, 95, 98, but there was also NT was out there. And that was the professional version. And that was a whole new level of access. It looked the same as the other ones but internally it was totally different, as far as getting information.
And so, we were the first one to develop a screen reader for Windows NT, at least one that worked. And that got us a lot of government business. That's what these developers were doing. That's why the company grew. Because the problems got bigger, the level of access got better, and the number of customers got bigger so we had to have people to handle all that.
Tony Candela: I do recall NT was causing vexation among people. Another sigh of relief when JAWS got on top of it.
Ted Henter: Yes, NT is designed purposely for high security, which means you can't hack into it. What screen readers do is they hack into operating systems and so depending what your level of security is, your typical screen reader could not run in NT.
And Microsoft realized this and they set out to help people develop solutions for NT. Well, some really sharp guys up in the Northeast, there was Micro Systems Software, I think it was. They had actually developed an NT magnifier. They made a lot of money selling it to the Social Security Administration.
So, they were looking to get out of the access technology business. They were making a lot of money with I think it was called Cyber Patrol, one of the nanny type things. And we'd been friendly all through the years and we talked to them and we licensed some of their NT technology, after negotiations and proving to ourselves that it would work for a screen reader. We licensed some of their NT technology and told Microsoft we were working on it and we got some help from Microsoft for a variety of things. Just information type stuff.
It was probably about nine months later, with a lot of brilliant effort from Glenn Gordon, we came out with an NT screen reader. That was around '97 or '98, I think.
The Social Security Administration had come out with a Request for a Proposal, but it has to be an operating system that was accessible, because they had about 700 blind people using these terminals.
And so, I think Unisys had made the bid, and they were going to go with Microsoft Windows NT and some other screen reader. The other screen readers had problems that they could deal with. I can't remember the name of it now but it was a fairly obscure one out of Canada. Not Synthavoice, but a different one.
Well, when push came to shove and they started testing, it didn't work. And so the sale to like 60,000 workstations depended on this screen reader working. So that's when we got serious about it and so did Microsoft. And we did come up with a solution, thanks to all these things I mentioned.
Then of course then you had a bunch of other problems because when you have a different operating system, you got different bugs, the systems were crashing. You've got 700 people that want to use it real soon at the Social Security Administration. So that kept us pretty busy, getting that to work.
And then, of course, we had to work with the magnification system, which was MAGic. And along about that time we bought MAGic from MSSI. So then we had other problems developing MAGic.
So those were interesting times.
Tony Candela: What made you decide you needed a magnification system, at all?
Ted Henter: Well, for one, we wanted to keep the Social Security Administration happy, and other government agencies were now buying the JAWS for NT. Like the IRS and others. And they also needed to buy magnifiers and there was only one that worked in NT at that time, and MAGic was the one.
So it made sense for us to buy that product from its developer and continue to develop that. Because there was money there to be made and it would sort of fit in with what we were already doing. We thought there was some synergy there, since we were already doing a lot of the stuff that needed to be done, for JAWS.
And then there's that whole magnification market that opens up to us, once we get the NT version we can easily do the other version. It's another product line for us and more market share.
Plus I believe at the time, Zoomtext was the premier magnifier. They were putting voice into the magnification system, making noises like they wanted to get into the screen reader business. So we wanted to just challenge them a bit too. We said, "Sure, you can try and get into the screen reader business, but don't look the other way on your magnification system cause we might get some of your business.
Tony Candela: And there are many low vision users out there who are grateful to have the combination of magnification and some kind of speech and vice versa, speech with some kind of magnification backup.
Ted Henter: Yeah. And clearly if the same developer is doing both, in a perfect world you're going to end up with a better result. And that's starting to come true. It took longer than we thought but that is coming true now with JAWS and MAGic, and the way they work together.
If one developer is in charge and in control of both products, you can have a better result. And until we had our own magnification product, we were never going to be in that position. So there were a lot of good reasons to go into magnification.
Tony Candela: Were there any special problems in the JAWS package working with braille interface? Terminals, braille display processors. People always advertise that, "Hey, my speech product works very well with the braille technologies," as if there were special problems that needed to be solved. Were there?
Ted Henter: Yeah. There were definitely special problems that needed to be solved. Personally, I'm not braille-oriented and neither is Glenn Gordon and we had the most influence on the product so given a list of issues, we would put braille at the bottom of the list and focus on the other ones.
So it wasn't until Tobias [Winnes] from Germany came over to talk to us, and this was late '94 I think it was. Him and his partner came over and talked to Eric and I and pointed out that in Europe they needed a Windows screen reader also, but they need braille, and convinced us that we needed to build braille support into JAWS for Windows.
So that was probably like the summer of '95, when we did finally support the braille displays.
And yet there were definitely some issues to deal with there, because the display medium is so different with speech. If a window pops up on the top left, if you want to hear it, if you hit the down arrow, you want to move the cursor down and read where you were, speech can do things braille can't do in places. And so we had to learn about how to do braille properly, on a PC, in Windows. And I can't remember what all the issues were.
We ended up with a couple of different ways of reading the screen. Just as in braille, what gets spoken is one of them.
Another one is to read the line that your cursor is on, either the JAWS cursor or the PC cursor. And then there's a formatted mode, where you can, I always wanted to be able to make the first 30 cells to be what's on the bottom line. There's a lot of different ways of doing it that we came up with, thanks to our scripting language.
But we got a lot of feedback from the Europeans, because they were very braille-oriented. And also, you've got to have Grade 2 braille. So for that we went to Duxbury and we licensed their software. So today, even the Grade 2 translation is done by Duxbury.
That was a very important step for us, to do the braille. And that also has made JAWS for Windows the number one screen reader in Europe. That and some great representation and distribution by Tobias and his company, which has since then been bought by Freedom Scientific. And Tobias is the main guy, in Europe, for Freedom Scientific.
But he set up the distribution for JAWS in Europe, and was in control of all the translations. Because they were actually done in Europe, except for French which is done in Quebec.
Tony Candela: Out there, now, is the latest phenomenon. It's probably been around a lot longer than most of us realize that uses Linux and the whole notion of open source. Did you run into this particular I guess I'm going to call it, operating system while you were still with Henter-Joyce and with Freedom Scientific?
Ted Henter: Yeah, in a manner of speaking. That's always been there. It's been there long before Windows and we had many requests to make JAWS work with Linux or UNIX or make a screen reader, whatever. But we always had to fall back on the economic issues that this wasn't economically feasible.
You go into any workplace in the United States or most of the world and they're using Windows. And we just didn't have the resources to spare to dabble with other operating systems.
And I understand today there are some solutions out there. I don't believe in the open source concept. I just don't think it's as good a way to make products.
And there's always been efforts, throughout the industry, to get together and work together to solve problems. Like all Windows computers need an off-screen model. We all need support for Braille displays. We all need support for synthesizers. So down through the years, there's always been attempts to get together and cooperate. Naturally, if you're an entrepreneur, you're not likely to get together and share your ideas and inventions with other entrepreneurs. It's just unnatural.
Tony Candela: And that's essentially, the open source concept, that people share their ideas about how the operating system works.
Ted Henter: Share their code. They write something, they share it, the source code and all that stuff. They make it available so others can take it and modify it from there. It's a great concept but it's like Communism. We'll all work together and we'll all get paid the same or we won't get paid. In an open source you don't get paid.
So it's difficult to devote a lot of resources to something like that, where you're not going to make any money on it. And that's the driving force. You can't hire skilled programmers, for example, and not pay 'em.
So far it seems to me that the for profit proprietary products and companies are the ones that have succeeded and those are the products that have succeeded. And for that reason, cause the people that are developing them, actually get paid. Only in some weird situations is the other way going to work. Like in the case now I think we have something going on with Microsoft. Microsoft is actually paying people to develop stuff and make it open source, or at least share the end results.
That might work but Microsoft's putting money into it. And then that's great but what do you do once version 1 comes out? Are you going to continue to pay somebody to develop it and continue it? I lean towards the capitalistic view.
Tony Candela: I imagine when the pressure is on to develop that next version, because the changes need to be made, that the motivating factor is the business itself.
Ted Henter: At the end of the day, the reason you're at work is the paycheck, so you can pay the rent and feed your wife and kids. Everybody's got to have that, to one extent or another.
Tony Candela: Did you notice that as the '90s started to draw to a close, did you notice yourself getting tired? You've been at this for quite a long time.
Ted Henter: Yeah, definitely. The company had grown to be what I considered quite large. There was other people doing the key functions. Jerry Bowman was managing the company. Glenn Gordon was designing and developing the software solutions, along with his team, of course. Glenn and a bunch of other very smart people. Eric and others were taking care of the Customer Relations and the Sales. There's a lot of key people when you've got 70 or so folks.
And I wasn't critical for any one thing. You get to be feeling like a fifth wheel, and that's just not the way I like to operate. It was nice I had time to spend doing other things, because I didn't have to spend every waking hour at work, so to speak.
It was less fun. I was less useful. There was significant danger that Microsoft was going to put us all out of business, in the late '90s, because they were still trying to do MSAA and off-screen models, and whatever else they had going. I think they had another project to develop an off-screen data pump. They always come up with some interesting, clever names.
So they're still making noises like they were going to do something, lower the bar, so to speak, so other developers could develop competent screen readers without tremendous investments.
Because by then, if you think about it, '99 and 2000, we had spent an awful lot of money developing JAWS. Now we didn't spend it all that year, but we'd been developing JAWS for Windows since about '92 and I hadn't even added up the money, but it was a lot. It was millions of dollars.
So for somebody to start out and get into that business and have a competitive product, that's the level of investment they were going to have to put in. So Microsoft was trying to make that easier to do and just all kinds of different things. It just wasn't as enjoyable as it had been.
And I also saw a lot of advantages to, not only selling the company, because I owned the majority of stock in the company and that was, of course, my livelihood. But because we had a very good screen reader and we were developing a magnifier, other companies had good software, like the OpenBook from Arkenstone, and other companies had hardware, like Blazie. If we could combine all this together, we could have the same sales force selling, the same tech support people. There was a lot of synergy in the development area, because we all had synthesizers and Braille displays.
So there was a great benefit in combining several of these smaller companies into one. And even though I didn't start out with that concept, it grew pretty rapidly and that's how Freedom Scientific came about.
Tony Candela: Who started the idea of Freedom Scientific?
Ted Henter: I started the idea of selling Henter-Joyce, which I decided to do in the fall of '99. In the fall of '98, excuse me. I decided to start looking into it.
And I shared that idea with my friends, like Deane, and searched around through business brokers, searched around for a buyer. And that's where we met Dick Chandler. At this point, I can't recall who first mentioned it, but the idea came up that the thing to do was to merge several companies together, because of those synergies that I just mentioned.
It certainly dawned on me, before that, because being friends with Deane as long as I had I thought, "Wouldn't it be great to join our two companies together. We'd have the hardware, we'd have the software. We could do all kinds of stuff."
But the reason Deane and I didn't do it, because our personalities are different, the way we run the companies was different. We knew it wouldn't work. At that point in time, we were not going back to working together, formally. We always had a high level of cooperation among the two companies. And we had always been friends, and are still friends, but I was not interested in merging our two companies together, if that's all it was, and still maintain control.
But it was perfectly fine with me if somebody else was going to buy the companies and merge them together. I thought that was a great solution. And Dick Chandler liked that idea, as well.
I think he arrived at that idea independent of me, but I'd certainly thought of it.
So that's how it came about. But I had kind of made the conscious decision that now would be a good time to sell, because the company is very successful, it's doing very well. Everything was going well, if you can recall, in the late '90's. Everybody's business was doing well. And that was obviously the time to get out.
And it was never my intention to quit working. I had intended to just work for the new owners, just take some of the responsibility away and bank some of the money, so to speak. Because you know being an entrepreneur, there's no security. If you lose the company then there goes 98% of your assets and that's not a good place to be when you're about 50 years old.
So, that's why the decision was made. And the concern with Microsoft, they're always meddling in our industry, telling people what great people they were and what great things they were going to do, very little of which has ever come true but can't blame them for claiming that.
Tony Candela: Well the official word was that this merger, it's probably not the right word, the rollup of Blazie Engineering, Henter-Joyce and the part of Arkenstone that folded into Freedom Scientific, would enable, especially Blazie and Henter to really pay more attention to the creative aspects of the company.
Ted Henter: Frankly, I was really looking forward to that part of it.
Another reason I wanted to sell at that point in time because Jerry Bowman, who had been running Henter-Joyce, so that I could spend more time on the development side, he was retiring at the end of the year 2000. And we didn't have anybody on the horizon that we wanted to turn the company over to, basically. Jerry was good at it, we trusted him and everybody in the management team felt good about it.
So that was another wrinkle. So yeah, I looked forward to being able to rid myself of that responsibility of managing the business and focus on more of the fun things. That's why, in time, what I wanted to do is develop the math software that Henter Math is doing now.
So had Jerry Bowman not been retiring, I would have had much less ambition to sell the company, much less desire. But all these things kind of came together. So it was true that if someone else took over the responsibility of the company, then Deane and I could focus on what we like to do.
But the only way we'd let somebody else take over that responsibility is if they paid good money for it, see. Because then if they screw up, at least we've got something already in the bank to fall back on. Whereas if we just hire somebody to take over the company, it's a little different. You're still holding all those eggs in your basket. If they make a mistake and you have problems, then you pay for it yourself.
So that's kind of the way it boiled down, although I must admit that it was really a good story to tell at the time too.
Tony Candela: Were the negotiations difficult?
Ted Henter: No, well, everything is relative and I don't have anything to compare it to because it's the only time I've ever been involved with something like this.
But I would have to say that things went pretty darned smoothly. It took a while, because initially Chandler was interested in buying us as part of his other company and then that didn't look like such a good idea so he then got some venture capital involved and kind of reorganized the deal. But I think it went pretty smoothly.
I first met Dick in the spring of '99 at CSUN, and by the spring of 2000, the deal was done. So it went pretty well.
Tony Candela: He was running a medical supplies company.
Ted Henter: Yeah, Sunrise Medical. They make all the stuff you need when you get home from the hospital, like oxygen tanks, wheel chairs, hospital type beds, other stuff like that. They were very successful rolling up that industry in the, I guess it would have been, late '80's, early '90's. It was a very big company. I forget how big but it was huge, compared to Henter-Joyce or Freedom Scientific.
He's a pretty sharp guy, very charming, very likeable guy and came at our industry with great intentions.
Tony Candela: So the deal went through. You and Deane, I assume, were offered the sums of money that were satisfactory to the two of you and Freedom Scientific was formed. You and Deane stayed on and things kept moving forward.
Were there any software developments while you were with Freedom Scientific?
Ted Henter: Yeah. I can't say for sure. But I stayed with Freedom Scientific I guess about ten months, after the sale. I'm just trying to remember. The sale was in March of 2000. I think I left in the winter of '01.
But, as everybody will tell you, when you sell a company and go to work for the new owners, well things are not as peachy keen as you thought they were going to be. And Deane and I both came to that realization.
We had been told that, of course. And even if we believed it was true, it wouldn't have stopped the deal. It was just one of those things we'd have to give up.
Tony Candela: What were you told?
Ted Henter: It never turns out as nice as you think it's going to, after the sale.
Tony Candela: Did people say anything specific to you about what might happen in this situation?
Ted Henter: No.
Tony Candela: In general, these things happen.
Ted Henter: Yeah, what are you going to do after? I said, "I'm going to work for the new company and develop their software." Invariably they say, "You know, my friend did that but he didn't like it. This, that, and that happened. It never turns out the way you think it will."
And see, at the time, I belonged to a group called TEC, which is the Executive Committee. And it's a group of businessmen who have monthly meetings and have lectures and talk amongst themselves. And so that's a very well-known situation in the small business network. That just happens.
Very few business owners sell their company and are happy working for the new guy. And of course you can be told that, but we were on such a high in those days, I didn't pay too much attention to it.
Tony Candela: From what you said, you had been willing to live day to day, month to month, anyways because that had always been your style, so you figured you probably would just deal with it.
Ted Henter: Yeah, exactly.
If I did get fired, well I had enough money where I wasn't going to starve and I could do something else.
What I'm getting at here is that things did not work out for me, or for Deane, but there's a variety of reasons and I don't want to get into all the details. But it's very difficult to take three separate companies, with three separate cultures and three separate product lines, and three separate locations, and combine them all together and start functioning as one company.
Of course we knew, going in, that that was the goal. But we had never done it before. I think Dick Chandler had but I had never done it before, Deane had never done it before. It's a very difficult thing to do.
Along about the same time, you know, there was the stock market crash, the NASDAQ crash and things were changing in our industry. Instead of me being able to work on my Math project, excuse me, the Virtual Pencil, no resources were allocated to that project, other than my salary. And I really needed more resources than that to be working on that.
I needed a programmer. Other expertise that was at the company but was not devoted to this project. Cause we were busy as usual, working on JAWS and MAGic, and now OpenBook and the Blazie products, and all that stuff. So I was very unhappy because I didn't get what I thought I was going to get.
Other things happened. I'm not sure exactly with the other guys but we came to the conclusion by the winter of '01 that it was time to leave the company.
Tony Candela: Richard Chandler was still with Freedom Scientific at this point. So your negotiations out of the company would be with him.
Ted Henter: With him, yeah.
Tony Candela: How'd they go?
Ted Henter: Very well. Dick is a very professional guy. He's been around, doing this kind of stuff, a long time. He doesn't take anything personally. So it went very well. We could say unkind things about what he was doing and he could do the same but it didn't become a personal problem.
Which was good. Very professional. I saw the handwriting on the wall it was time to go. Had employment contracts and I had this Math product that I didn't own anymore. They owned it. So I worked out a deal with them that I could buy the Math product from them, from Freedom, and I could get an amendment to my non-compete, because both Deane and I had long term no-compete agreements.
And so, when I left the company, I was quite pleased with the way things went with the negotiations.
I wasn't happy to be leaving the company, because that was never my plans, but, given that I was going to leave, no matter what, I was quite happy with the way it worked out.
Tony Candela: And you came away with not only a legacy but you came away with the Math product?
Ted Henter: Yeah. That's what I was very pleased about.
Of course, at that point in time, it was just an idea. We really had no software although we had hired a consultant or two to start working on it. That was a dead end. It didn't work out the way I wanted it to and so we really didn't have anything other than the idea and a patent. I had gotten a patent on the idea, back around '97 or so.
So what it boils down to is I had the rights to the idea. So then I had the intentions of forming another company and developing that product. And that's why I got all that stuff worked out with Freedom Scientific was to get the amendment to the non-competing and all that sort of stuff.
Cause I had no intention of getting into any kind of trouble with Freedom. I have a lot of friends there. I want them to succeed. I own stock in the company. I still believe in the concept of what we tried to do. We just stubbed our toe a couple of times.
The company is very successful right now and getting stronger every day, because it's coming out of some of the problems it got into.
So it was never my intention to cause trouble for Freedom. So I tried to make my departure as smooth as possible. And keep friends there and, as luck would have it, they came back awhile later here, a year or so later, and asked me to serve on the Board of Directors, which I'm doing and I enjoy that quite a bit.
Tony Candela: In between, Richard Chandler left? Lee Hamilton came aboard.
Ted Henter: Uh huh.
Tony Candela: Did that smoothen the way for you to return to the Board, because now you had a different person, no history with this new individual?
Ted Henter: Sort of. Richard Chandler hasn't really left. He's no longer the CEO but he's still on the Board of Directors, and a stockholder. But he was replaced as CEO by Lee Hamilton.
Let me back up a little bit. Initially, Dick did not want Deane or I on the Board, because of our lack of experience in such matters. We were more the nuts and bolts, software development types, or hardware development, in Deane's case. And he had the Board populated with more financially aware people, like the venture capitalists and other successful business people.
And that was fine. But when the Board made some changes, and hired Lee Hamilton as the CEO, I guess, I wasn't there, I guess at that point it might be a good idea to have one of the old guys back on there, just at least for some historical data, nothing else.
And so I was available and so they asked me to come and serve on the Board. Which has been quite interesting. I've been on the Board for I think it's two years now.
Enjoyable. We just had a Board meeting a couple of days ago, so I get to see my old friends at the company who come and make the reports. I get to learn a lot from these financial guys that really know a lot about business, big business and big money. The way they think and the numbers they look at. It's all very new to me and very educational and somewhat interesting. So it's a good experience.
Tony Candela: Do you think that it's either a necessary evil or a necessary good thing that a lot of the assistive technology companies are merging and growing themselves into larger conglomerates?
Ted Henter: It's a natural progression, is all it is. You look at the automobile industry, back in the turn of the century. At 1900 we had dozens of automobile companies around and now there's very few. There's General Motors and Ford are the only ones left here in the U.S.
So it's just a natural progression. There is some positive things because the companies get bigger and maybe take four companies and combine them into one, that's sort of what happens. Then all those resources can be focused on the same problems, as opposed to four separate solutions to the same problem. So there are economies of scale. So it's good in that sense.
Of course, on the other hand, if the choices get too small, if there's one or two big players, then they might be too small, and then you get less, possibly less creativity and of course, less choice.
So at this point in time, we are way better off than we've [ever] been before, as far as access to computers. JAWS and MAGic and Zoomtext and Window-Eyes and Dolphin and PAC Mate and all those, the access is way better today than it's ever been in my lifetime, as far as I can tell. So we're doing something right is I guess the way I would put it.
Tony Candela: Deane Blazie has told me that he thinks that there's still room for the smaller company, in this mix and I guess you would agree since you then formalized the company called Henter Math?
Ted Henter: Yes. Absolutely. There's definitely still room.
Yes, we have Henter Math. It's about four people and we hope it will grow but there's no guarantee. But see, we're doing something that the big company, like Freedom Scientific, was not interested in and will not be interested in, until we can start showing some real promise and some cash flow, let's say.
Because also the bigger you get, the further you get from the concept of doing it for fun or enjoying the business, because it needs to be done. You get more and more driven by the dollars. Because now you've got some big money invested. You've got people who have invested their money and they want to see a return. So you have different forces driving you.
So a company like Freedom, right now, is not interested in my product, Virtual Pencil. But if you start making some money and getting some customers and they start seeing some of the synergy that's there, then there will come a time when it will be reasonable for them to be interested.
I think that's just the way it works with industries.
Tony Candela: Henter Math has, as you say, four employees. One is your daughter, Emley. So this is the first time, I guess, you've had a family connection in your work, a direct family connection, other than Mel, back in the old days, running the office operations.
Ted Henter: Yeah. But also, Emley and Elizabeth, another of the three daughters, both worked for the company when they weren't in school, in the summertime. Of course, not serious jobs like Emley's is now. Those summertime, teen-age type jobs.
And we've also hired sisters-in-laws and brother-in-laws and cousins and nephews, so we've got a lot of family involved. But it's very enjoyable to be working with Emley in the business together and also some other great people. Jeff [Dittel is] a very accomplished programmer and doing a great job with the software design and development.
So it's a new experience and it's a fun thing. Henter-Joyce, as you brought up once before, the bigger the business gets, the less fun it can be to be involved, depending on your position. The position I was in, it wasn't a lot of fun any more. It was a lot of headaches, whereas now, I have just as many headaches but I'm having more fun too. Although I'm not making any money at it, yet.
Tony Candela: What are your hopes for the Virtual Pencil?
Ted Henter: Within six or ten years, this product or one like it will be in every high school and college in the country, if not the world. Because it's something that absolutely has to be done and once it is done, once the product is there, it will be adopted by all those who need to use something like this. There's no doubt in my mind about that.
The obvious problem now is we have to develop the software and until we develop the software, it will be difficult to convince people that this is the way to do math and science. But all that's coming.
So we're developing the software and when we show people the products that we have, arithmetic, fractions and algebra, they love it. We get very, very few people say, "Oh no, that's not going to work."
I'm sure even the Wright Brothers had people say, "Oh no, no, no. That's never going to fly."
So this product is going to be, or one like it, I'm not saying it's going to be ours, I hope it's ours. But a product that does what ours does, it's just going to be everywhere, some time in our future. And I sincerely believe that. Because it's just a better way of doing math, for somebody who can't operate a pencil. Someone who is pencil impaired.
I mentioned math but it's not only for math. I think I mentioned earlier on the tape, it's for math and sciences, like engineering and physics and chemistry. All those things that involve solving an equation.
And those things that currently, if you're blind, you have to take it from print, have someone convert it to Braille. Of course, if it's all computerized you might be able to do that with the technology. You can work through the problems, the equations, in Braille. Then you have to have somebody convert it back. And that's the way it's done nowadays like in elementary schools.
So it's labor intensive. That's what it is. So we hope to take all that, use the computer for what it does well, and develop a whole new way of solving these equations for somebody who cannot operate a pencil.
Tony Candela: You're in your relatively early '50's.
Ted Henter: 53.
Tony Candela: And you've done all this, so far, and you've mentioned a rough sketch of a ten-year plan for Henter Math and the Virtual Pencil.
Even after the ten years, you'll still be relatively young, by today's standards. Do you have other things in mind that you're going to be doing, to occupy your time?
Ted Henter: Well, yeah. Even right now, the Virtual Pencil takes up some of my time but I'm also on a couple of different Boards. As I mentioned, Freedom Scientific and also the Watson Center for the Blind. And so I have a lot of things I'm doing, in those areas, that take up a lot of time. Committees and whatnot at the Watson Center.
Then I'm also involved, I do martial arts training two or three days a week. So I'm going after my Brown sash in Kung Fu in November. And I've been doing that for about five years. So that takes up a certain amount of time.
And then I also do a little bit of canoe racing. I race through the Panama Canal each year and that's just for fun but I have to spend some time training, getting ready for that.
Those are all recreational type things. I still water ski and do some snow skiing. I broke my collar bone last year going snow skiing.
Tony Candela: You're still hurting yourself.
Ted Henter: Still hurting myself, yeah. Not intentionally.
So those are just the recreational stuff but professionally speaking, I have not looked past Virtual Pencil and that product line because it's a huge problem, math and the sciences. There's a lot to be done there so I think that's going to keep me busy until I retire when I'm 70. That's my goal at the moment, anyway. To retire when I'm 70.
Tony Candela: So we only have 17 years left, of your genius and creativity?
Well, I hope that you continue to be as ingenious and creative, aggressive in the business world, as you've been. The world thanks you for keeping us all from truly, truly falling down and not being able to function through your work in producing JAWS for Windows and all the work you're doing.
And there are a lot of kids out there in this generation and the generation to come, who I think are going to end up in professions that they might have shied away from, with the good work that I know will come from the Virtual Pencil.
Ted Henter: That's very kind of you, Tony. I have to point out, I was there when things happened and good things happened to me and led to certain successes so I'm amazed when I look back at how it all worked out.
Of course, having that attitude that things will work out, knowing that God has given me the opportunities and hasn't given me something I can't handle, just having that right attitude has made a big difference in me.
And also, having the good fortune to meet these key people that came along like Eric Damery, Glenn Gordon and Jerry Bowman, and a whole bunch of others that have been at Henter-Joyce and Maryland Computer Services and are now Freedom Scientific. There's a whole bunch of people that have contributed to the success of JAWS and to the success of the company.
I get the lion's share of the credit for that because I was the founder and this and that, but I don't deserve that much of the credit. It's so important to have a cohesive group like that, working together.
(End of Part 4 of 5)
