Paul Taylor, the engineer who created the TTY machine for the deaf, has died | Hacker News Reader

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

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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

> When a party is ready to hang up the phone he writes four stars.

I wish we had a convention like this for text messages. Some generally accepted way to “hang up” that isn’t taken as rude.

It’s a nonissue with people you text frequently, the conversation just waxes and wanes naturally. Maybe it’s just me, but for texts with acquaintances, distant relations, etc, theres no good way to end the interaction like there is over the phone. You can’t just text “alright I gotta go, talk to you later”.

Modern TTY users indicate the end of conversation by typing in “GA” at the end denoting Go Ahead.

And end of transmission by ending it with “SKSK” for Stop Keying.

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 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.

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.

A couple of years ago I converted a telephone handset into a lineman's handset to troubleshoot the PBX system at work. As a kid I'd always marveled at how two-way voice (and data!) communication and numbers could be transmitted over four wires, and it really blew my mind when I learned that just two are being used per line.

We had pulse-tone rotary phones which were simple enough to understand - just count the pulses. I'm still working on completely grasping the combined tones used in touch-tone dialing, specifically the way they would have been interpreted at the switchboard before the introduction of digital PBX systems.

I loved being able to dial a number just by clicking the hang-up button fast enough and counting. Unfortunately pulse dialing is obsolete enough that you'd have a hard time finding a system where that still works.

This engineer inventor changed my great uncle’s life. My great uncle got scarlet fever at age 8 in the 1930s and had a fever of 108 F and nearly died. Because of nerve damage to his ear from the fever, he became completely Deaf at age 11. He learned how to lip read on his own and graduated high school when usually people like him would typically be excluded. Nothing stopped him. He even fished the fertile Pacific Ocean waters for Alaskan Salmon for a living, which was obviously extremely dangerous for anyone.

Some of my best memories of my grandmother and her brother (my great uncle) as a kid were at my grandmother’s house, whenever she had a phone call from her brother. Her talking to her brother via a physical TTY terminal with the phone handset in the terminal receiver was just so fascinating, captivating and interesting to see in the 90s as a kid.

My grandmother had a similar history- illness leading to deafness that was completed deafness by the time I was born.

The only way to talk to grandma was via the TTY, because she lived a four hour drive away. The phone would ring, we'd pick up and hear beeps. "Mom, it's grandma!". This seemed totally normal to us but in hindsight it must have dramatically changed her life, to be able to call people, to talk to her grandkids. How lonely it must have been before that.

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 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.

Both are TeleTYpewriters but they are not the same device.

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.

https://archive.is/1plfb - link without paywall

My 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.

Thanks to people like him now we have a system like CaptionCall. You call a person or person calls you, the call is forwarded to a special phone number designated to you for free. A person types the conversation for you using AI to correct the errors. You are talking on the smartphone and looking at real time transcript.

People with that disability now are doing interviews and getting jobs. Not possible before. It needs one time investment in a fast smartphone.

My father depended on the TTY for decades. My father is deaf and being the tech savvy person in the family, I would type on behalf of my father when communicating with his friends. Before video calling TTY was the only way he could communicate with his friends, other than driving to their houses. Reading Paul Taylors biography is really inspirational, and grateful for the impact his work brought.

So many inventors who changed so many human lives just fade out of memory. I wish we had a wall of remembrance for all these people.

He was instrumental in the development of one of the earliest relay services in the mid-80's in St. Louis. The way it worked back then was more of a community collaboration among many hearing volunteers and the deaf community. The volunteers would work as relay operator, making phone calls for us deaf and relaying the conversation with us through TTYs. Some of the volunteers were my friends' parents which made for awkward moments at times!

But it was very helpful in bridging the gap between the hearing and deaf communities in St Louis and the rest is history.

Lots of respect and admiration for Paul Taylor as a very instrumental trailblazer for the Deaf.

> “He saw there were old World War II teletype machines not being used,” said his daughter. “Another deaf engineer in California had come up with the way to send signals over phone lines. My dad came up with the coupler component the teletype needed. He then pressed Western Union to provide the old machines to deaf people and Bell telephone to use them on their lines.”

Another TDD pioneer, James Marsters, is described here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/us/23marsters.html

Paul Taylor[0] died on January 11, 2021[1]:

> “Remembering Paul Taylor, One of the Early TTY Activists.”

> Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, Inc. (TDI) would like to send condolences to the friends and family of Paul Taylor upon learning of his passing.. Paul passed away peacefully at home surrounded by his loving wife, Sally, and their children and grandchildren on January 11. Paul Taylor leaves behind a legacy that TDI values and greatly cherishes.

> Paul Taylor began his TDI journey by forming the first local telecommunications advocacy group in St. Louis and was instrumental in establishing the 3rd relay service in the country which later became Relay Missouri.

> While in St. Louis, Missouri, Paul chaired a committee that created a manual on repairing TTYs titled “Typewriters Made Easy”, better known as the Red Book.

----

P.S. On September 22, 2020 DEAF.Inc shared[2] a video “Show-Me Deaf Spotlight: Paul Taylor”[3]:

> As the Missouri Commission for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (MCDHH) and DEAF Inc. continue celebrating Deaf Awareness Month, we going to put a spotlight on a Deaf Missourian that made one of the greatest impacts on communication equality for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing. Watch and learn what Paul Taylor did in the area of telecommunication accessibility.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Taylor_%28engineer%29

[1] https://tdiforaccess.org/paul-taylor-one-of-the-early-tty-ac...

[2] https://twitter.com/DEAF_Inc/status/1308424049102450689

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgDWSTB1P_I

TTY has been around since the 1800s. He did not invent the TTY. He invented the TDD.

The article makes that clear, even if the title doesn't.

> As rudimentary as it may seem now — both users needed a machine to type messages back and forth on what was called TTY, Telecommunications Device for the Deaf

"TTY" and "TDD" are not the same thing

> "My father never stopped advocating for TTY"

Again.

> Taylor advocated for a national operator relay system for the deaf to allow them to communicate with people who were not deaf and did not have a TTY machine

Again.

etc. The article does not in fact "make that clear".

Beautiful and moving story, thanks for sharing!

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!

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.

I wonder if there is an equivalent political thing for the blind or for the partially vision impaired. I've only read or heard about these kind of divides (e.g. rejecting fixes for the condition, argument about whether it is an impairment) when it comes to hearing.

“Hard of hearing” is more neutral and better accepted.

As someone younger who is HoH, I have no objection to the term hearing impaired. Though I can understand why someone might find it derogatory as it does, indeed, emphasize the lack of ability.

But that's actually why I use the term myself. I have found that euphemisms, including "hard of hearing" often don't successfully communicate what needs to be conveyed.

"Hard of hearing" just doesn't seem to sink in. Even "very hard of hearing" doesn't. Often the other person thinks it must be like struggling to hear the high notes in music or something. While I'm not deaf (and definitely not culturally Deaf), I generally can't understand spoken language without amplification. This often seems to surprise people, even when I've told them ahead that I'm hard of hearing.

"Nearly deaf" or "mostly deaf" would be accurate enough, but it feels odd and I don't like it. "Severe hearing impairment" communicates my experience, and also the accommodations I may need from others, quite effectively.

A 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.

[1] https://www.federalrelay.us/tty

It’s interesting how the attitude of the tech world is changing.

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