Leonard Erickson wrote in a message to Roy J. Tellason:

 -=> Quoting Roy J. Tellason to Jasen Betts <=-

 RJT> Jasen Betts wrote in a message to Leonard Erickson:
 LE>  
 LE> And finally, consider that these things are *not* "mass produced"
 LE> in any sense of the word. That last is probably the killer.
 LE>  
 JB> yeah. still seems a little steep though.

 RJT> I understand that some of those setups for deaf people to use over
 RJT> phone lines are outrageously expensive,  too.  For no particular
 RJT> reason that I can see... 

 LE> Non-standard and lack of demand. One of the local sysops was at
 LE> least partialy deaf. He could give you an earful.

 LE> On the other hand, all of them for the last 10-15 years include
 LE> support for Bell 103 using ASCII.

 LE> The original protocol was based on using a simple, half-duplex FSK
 LE> setup attached to surplus teletype units that used the Baudot
 LE> character set.

And at some absurdly low baud rate...

 LE> Baudot is a *5* bit character set 

I'm somewhat familiar with it.

 LE> (two of the characters are equivalent to the ASCII SI and SO 
 LE> characters and cause the carriage to "shift" the way old 
 LE> mechanical typewriters did when you hit the shift key.

Yeah,  "letters" and "figures".

 LE> The Weitbrecht "protocol" that the modified units used used 1800 Hz
 LE> for mark and silence for space. And ran at the stand TTY rate of
 LE> 45.45 baud.

Euw.  I guess that's what the mechanicals were up to,  and there weren't
any electronics to buffer.

 LE> And Baudot TTYs used 1 start bit, 5 data bits, 1.5 stop bits (note
 LE> that every UART I've ever checked the data sheets for has the 1.5
 LE> stop bits supported by treating "2 stop bits" as 1.5 when 5 data
 LE> bits are selected)

Yep.

 LE> Back in the early 80s, a modem that'd do Weitbrecht and Bell 103
 LE> ran $300. Sad to say, when I stumbled across the web site in the
 LE> late 80s, it *still* cost $300.

That's absurd.

 LE> I think the problem is that there's essentially *no* competition in
 LE> this field. And very little for gear for the blind. 

 LE> I bought a 1930s(?) brailler (think braille equivalent of a
 LE> typewrite) on ebay for a friend. We compared it with the brand new
 LE> (asin I helped take it out of the box) one she'd had on loan from
 LE> the local Commission for the Blind. They were essentially
 LE> *identical*. And the design isn't *that* "perfect".

I've seen those,  but not for a lot of years.

 LE> The markets aren't big enough for it to be worth trying to develop
 LE> a "better" unit, not with the current version being so entrenched.

 LE> I do see a big shakeup coming, as one of the two big outfits in
 LE> speech for the blind has just come out with a Pocket PC that has
 LE> speech and braille output for $2500, while the "entrenched" unit is
 LE> a gizmo closer in capabilities to an older Palm or other handheld
 LE> (runs Windows CE 2.2) which runs $7000.

 LE> If they don't screw it up, I expect to see a bit of infighting. And
 LE> maybe some price drops. 

That'd be nice.  For the miniscule amount it would cost to ship these
things darn near anywhere,  I expect that a wider market than just the US
would help this too.

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