Paul Taylor, the engineer who created the TTY machine for the deaf, has died
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Re: Paul Taylor, the engineer who created the TTY machine for the deaf, has died
#2I never knew the origins of the TTY console on my machine. To hear it was an accessibility tool at first is really cool. It does make sense that if these were widely available, people would use them to dial into a computer!
I wonder what other interesting innovations I use that I don’t realize have such a deep history. Thanks for sharing the article.
Re: Paul Taylor, the engineer who created the TTY machine for the deaf, has died
#3Working in IT, the vast majority of engineers and IT adjacent people have little care or desire to learn about phone or communications systems. Especially nowadays when Teams and Zoom take care of your VoIP woes on the backend, and AWS or Azure are always doing something way cooler than a PBX can.
I was lucky to work alongside an enterprise PBX architect and not only learn about phone systems, but come to appreciate the history of them as well. One of the more interesting things to me has always been the amount of accessibility that gets designed into phone systems. TTY, translation services, different languages, etc. It's something that always reminds me we're designing and dealing with a wide variety of humans that I don't get when designing a network.
Re: Paul Taylor, the engineer who created the TTY machine for the deaf, has died
#4https://archive.is/1plfb - link without paywall
Re: Paul Taylor, the engineer who created the TTY machine for the deaf, has died
#5I never knew the origins of the TTY console on my machine. To hear it was an accessibility tool at first is really cool. It does make sense that if these were widely available, people would use them to dial into a computer! I wonder what other interesting innovations I use that I don’t realize have such a deep history. Thanks for sharing the article.
It wasn’t an accessibility tool first. TTY dates from the mid-19th century.
Paul Taylor’s innovations were to use the technology to provide telecommunications for the deaf, and then lobby for the creation of the operator relay system enabling TTY users to communicate with people who didn’t have a TTY. The machines already existed.
Re: Paul Taylor, the engineer who created the TTY machine for the deaf, has died
#6Working in IT, the vast majority of engineers and IT adjacent people have little care or desire to learn about phone or communications systems. Especially nowadays when Teams and Zoom take care of your VoIP woes on the backend, and AWS or Azure are always doing something way cooler than a PBX can. I was lucky to work alongside an enterprise PBX architect and not only learn about phone systems, but come to appreciate…
I built PBX software as VoIP took over. Parallelizing virtual telephony timing with CPU virtualization was a fun and challenging project.
It is amazing to me how few people understand the transition from phreaking to hacking culture...
2600 at least should be taught in every CS degree program as a footnote of the industry...
Re: Paul Taylor, the engineer who created the TTY machine for the deaf, has died
#7If there are others here who are as confused as I was by this article, what they're referring to is not a "regular" teleprinter or a software TTY as the audience on this website might expect, but a teleprinter accessibility device which is also called a TTY: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_device_for_...
Re: Paul Taylor, the engineer who created the TTY machine for the deaf, has died
#8I never knew the origins of the TTY console on my machine. To hear it was an accessibility tool at first is really cool. It does make sense that if these were widely available, people would use them to dial into a computer! I wonder what other interesting innovations I use that I don’t realize have such a deep history. Thanks for sharing the article.
Both are TeleTYpewriters but they are not the same device.
Re: Paul Taylor, the engineer who created the TTY machine for the deaf, has died
#9My grandmother was deaf and we primarily communicated with her over TTY and fax. Before she had TTY she would call and leave a message, either on the machine or with whoever answered. In the days before widespread email and texting this was a boon.
Re: Paul Taylor, the engineer who created the TTY machine for the deaf, has died
#10A long time ago, before cell data, when I was learning to program, I may or may not have used the TTY client that came with Visual Basic to abuse the “I’m paying for it with my telephone fees I might as well use it” federal TTY voice relay service [1] to have an operator read my emails and top slashdot news stories to me.