[NFBCS] Blast from the past

[dandrews920 at comcast.net]

I am going to be contrarian here. I am familiar with them all -- in the early 90's, while at the NFB Technology Center, I did reviews of all of them.

I used PROVOX. It wasn't widely used, but in certain situations it was great. It was developed by Chuck Hallenbeck, who was a blind guy who worked at the University of Kansas. I think the Flipper guy was a Professor too. This was in the days where a good programmer could go into his basement and write a good screen reader.

PROVOX was written in assembly language, so was small, about 40K. It also was inobtrusive, so you could use it with applications that took a lot of resources. I ran it real-time with one of the early systems used to provide dial-up newspapers. Chuck also wrote Turbo Braille, which may be familiar to more people. Full disclosure, I worked for the company for a while.

Dave



-----Original Message-----
From: NFBCS <nfbcs-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Jim Barbour via NFBCS
Sent: Wednesday, February 28, 2024 2:53 PM
To: NFB in Computer Science Mailing List <nfbcs at nfbnet.org>
Cc: Jim Barbour <jbar at barcore.com>; Buddy Brannan <buddy at brannan.name>
Subject: Re: [NFBCS] Blast from the past

I also used Flipper and it was my favorite dos based screen reader.

Jim

On Wed, Feb 28, 2024 at 03:48:40PM -0500, Buddy Brannan via NFBCS wrote:
> I also used, and really liked, Flipper, from version 2.74 to 
> 4.somehing. And like a lot of folks, I started with an Apple IIe and 
> Braille Edit and BEX.
> 
> --
> Buddy Brannan, KB5ELV, WRVB670 - Erie, PA
> Email: buddy at brannan.name
> Mobile: (814) 431-0962
> 
> On Feb 28, 2024, at 2:44 PM, Steve Jacobson via NFBCS 
> <nfbcs at nfbnet.org> wrote:
> 
> Doug,
> I also used Flipper, and while it may have been before Brian's time, 
> we had the Creator of FLIPPER on our NFBCS annual meeting agenda, but 
> I don't remember which year.
> Best regards,
> Steve Jacobson
> -----Original Message-----
> From: NFBCS <nfbcs-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Doug Lee via NFBCS
> Sent: Wednesday, February 28, 2024 5:59 AM
> To: NFB in Computer Science Mailing List <nfbcs at nfbnet.org>
> Cc: Doug Lee <dgl at dlee.org>
> Subject: Re: [NFBCS] Blast from the past Charles Black wrote:
> 
>   In order to join this celebration of being "well experienced", I
>   remember the Apple IIe and using the Echo 2. It was amazing for me
>   to
>   create D&D adventure games, text based. I also developed financial
>   programs to achieve daily tasks  . Now, back to 2024..
> 
> To me, this was more historical preservation, and discovery for some 
> including me - I never knew anyone else who used Flipper until Brian 
> wrote on this thread. It was interesting to me to discover that it may 
> have been more popular than I thought at the time.
> If you want to say, did you publish any of your games? Text games are 
> still alive and well in some communities, and I even spotted a 
> college-age guy launching an Apple emulator a couple months or so ago 
> that, I verified myself, ran TexTalker. I used it to show some younger 
> folk what things were like back then, though the emulator seemed to 
> struggle with my CapLock key and would not recognize lower-case 
> commands. Like this thread, I suspect it was an amusement for many of 
> us and an education for several.
> Leaving Brian's message below because I referenced it.
> On 2/26/24, Brian Buhrow via NFBCS <nfbcs at nfbnet.org> wrote:
> 
>        hello.  Doug mentioned Flipper in his historical journey.  I,
>   too
>   started with Apple II and Street Electronics Texttalker.  I still
>   have
>   the original Apple II reference manual in braille, which came
>   complete
>   with tactile diagrams of memory maps and the complete 6502 assembly
>   instruction set, listed by pneumonic.  I read the thing from cover
>   to
>   cover. (many covers for those who remember multi-volume braille
>   books.)
>        However, it was Flipper that inspired me to write this message.
>    Of
>   all the DOS based screen readers I used over the years, Flipper was
>   the easiest to use, ran the fastest, and provided the most
>   information
>   in the most efficient fashion!  How good was it, you might ask?
>   For me, it was so good, that I used it well into the 2000's,
>   retiring
>   it finally in 2007.
>   Well, partially.  I now use Mike Gorse's Yasr as my daily screen
>   reader.
>   Howevr, to make it
>   more compatible with my muscle memory, I rewrote all of the keymaps
>   to
>   match the old Flipper commands, as well as rewriting some of the
>   punctuation nomenclature to match what Flipper used to say.  So, for
>   some of us, Flipper is still alive and well!
>   -thanks
>   -Brian
>