-=> Quoting Roy J. Tellason to Leonard Erickson <=-

 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.

 RJT> And at some absurdly low baud rate...
 
 LE> Baudot is a *5* bit character set 

 RJT> 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.

 RJT> Yeah,  "letters" and "figures".

With at least three different sets of "figures" characters.
"regular",
"stock market" and "weather".
 
 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.

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

Well, consifder that the TTY units used 20 mA current loop in many
cases, /*not* RS-232. (BTW, the old IBM PC Asynch cards have jumpers
for running them as 20 mA current loop instead of RS-232! They use pins
not used by RS-232)

 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)

 RJT> 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.

 RJT> That's absurd.
 
Like a lot of semi-monopoly companies, they saw no reason to sell the
gear for less than what they'd originally priced them for even if the
market was vanishing due to better gear.

 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. 

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

The $7000 unit is produced in New Zealand. http://www.braillenote.com


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