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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

#11

Post by rootsudo »

gogopuppygogo wrote: post #6
glasss wrote: post #3

Working 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...

For the tone: No one cares about blue boxing, beige boxing or the old tales of cap'n crunch unless you bring up how he was banned/potential pedo.

For the culture: 2600 magazines are also considered contraband in many parts of the world, and also stopped distribution, turns out if many fans of your work are pirates, it may be hard to have circulation.

Re: Paul Taylor, the engineer who created the TTY machine for the deaf, has died

#12

Post by jeofken »

gen3 wrote: post #2

I 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 is a different device than the TTY commonly emulated in your terminal window.

Naming things is one of the two hard things in computer science, along with naming things and off by one errors.

Re: Paul Taylor, the engineer who created the TTY machine for the deaf, has died

#14

Post by elil17 »

patriarchybad wrote: post #13

Please consider using "hearing impaired" as a more inclusive term, or ideally "deaf and hard of hearing". Their are plenty of people who can still hear some things but are not entirely deaf.

Of Deaf and hard of hearing people I know, the young ones (less than 50) all really dislike the term "hearing impaired" because it implies that they are impaired (in the view of many, it's hearing people who are impaired because we don't know how to communicate using sign languages). Many also believe that "Deaf" should be capitalized because of the Deaf community's shared language and culture.

Re: Paul Taylor, the engineer who created the TTY machine for the deaf, has died

#15

Post by hobs »

elil17 wrote: post #14
patriarchybad wrote: post #13

Please consider using "hearing impaired" as a more inclusive term, or ideally "deaf and hard of hearing". Their are plenty of people who can still hear some things but are not entirely deaf.

Of Deaf and hard of hearing people I know, the young ones (less than 50) all really dislike the term "hearing impaired" because it implies that they are impaired (in the view of many, it's hearing people who are impaired because we don't know how to communicate using sign languages). Many also believe that "Deaf" should be capitalized because of the Deaf community's shared language and culture.

In my experience this is pretty contentious depending on who you talk to in the community, some people don't buy into the deafness as a benefit and its definitely a political issue.

Re: Paul Taylor, the engineer who created the TTY machine for the deaf, has died

#16

Post by dang »

lancebeet wrote: post #7

If 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_...

We've edited the title to make that clearer. Thanks!

Re: Paul Taylor, the engineer who created the TTY machine for the deaf, has died

#17

Post by _nalply »

Teletypes in Switzerland were ITU V.21 with three modifications:

- 110 baud instead of 300 baud

- not full duplex

- carrier tone

I experimented with a Java application and FFT to try to write a soft modem, so I still know the exact specification by heart. Bit 1 was 960 Hz, Bit 0 was 1160 Hz, the carrier tone 1060 Hz, and there were 2 stop bits. This means, the teletype could transmit 11 letters a second.

The carrier tone is special: if someone stopped typing, the teletype switched to the carrier tone and kept it on for about 3 seconds then stopped.

Being not full-duplex Deaf users used a convention so they know when they can type. The called party begins typing and ends with two stars, like this **. Then the caller knows he can type and also indicates the end with two stars. When a party is ready to hang up the phone he writes four stars.

This is what my model (Telescrit) looked like: https://db1.rehadat.de/rehadat/bilder/TC058000/tc058773.jpg

Re: Paul Taylor, the engineer who created the TTY machine for the deaf, has died

#20

Post by EvanAnderson »

rootsudo wrote: post #11
gogopuppygogo wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

For the tone: No one cares about blue boxing, beige boxing or the old tales of cap'n crunch unless you bring up how he was banned/potential pedo. For the culture: 2600 magazines are also considered contraband in many parts of the world, and also stopped distribution, turns out if many fans of your work are pirates, it may be hard to have circulation.

The lesson about in-band vs. out-of-band signaling is a good one, even if the specifics of blue boxing aren't discussed. The evolution of panel-pulsing to MF to SS7 is interesting, and knowing some of that history provides context to why some things are the way they are today in voice telephony.
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