[jaws-uk] Re: Happy 20th Birthday, JAWS for Windows
- From: "Paul Roberts" <anorack@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <jaws-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2015 00:21:53 -0000
Thanks Colin for this.
Hadn't realised JAWS was 20 this month.
I have been using JAWS since 2001, both at home and at work.
At home, i've used JAWS 3.7 (demo version) 4.0, 5, 9 and 12
at work, I used JAWS 4.02, 5, 7, 12 and now 15.
Paul.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Colin Howard" <colin@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <jaws-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, January 28, 2015 8:25 PM
Subject: [jaws-uk] Happy 20th Birthday, JAWS for Windows
: Greetings,
:
: Seen on the VicugL group, thought it may be of interest! Shows how rapidly
: time passes!
:
: From: David Goldfield <david.goldfield@xxxxxxxxxxx>
: Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2015 20:46:24 -0500
:
: Episode 102 of Freedom Scientific's FSCast podcast reminds us that 2015
: marks the 20th anniversary of the JAWS for Windows screen reader. In
fact,
: Jonathan Mosen reminds us that January is, in fact, the month in which
JAWS
: turned 20. I remember installing and using JFW 1.0 back in January of
1995
: and I thought I'd dedicate this short blog post to some of my early
: memories of that product and of that time in general.
:
: In 1995, I was working for Blazie Engineering providing technical
support.
: Windows 3.1 was a fairly well-established operating system with several
: Windows screen readers already available, including Blazie's own Windows
: Master which I believe was already out at that time. While I had used
: Windows 3.1 and was familiar with it on a very basic level, I was a
: edicated DOS user. While I was very familiar with Vocal-eyes and JAWS
: for DOS, ASAP from Microtalk was my screen reader of choice, along with
: a trusty Braille 'n Speak as my speech synthesizer.
: It was during the end of 1994 or the very beginning of 1995 when we
received
: our boxed copy of JAWS for Windows 1.0, with January 19, 1995
: being the official launch date of that product. If you really want to read
a
: piece of classic assistive technology history, you can, courtesy
: of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, read the December 1994
: Henter-Joyce newsletter which, among other things, contains the big
: announcement regarding JFW 1.0.
:
: Around this time, I found out I had enlarged tonsils which needed
: to be removed. As I constantly used my voice to do my job, it was
: recommended I stay home for two weeks during my recuperation. This
: was, I decided, the perfect time to finally dive into Windows 3.1 with
: our new copy of JAWS for Windows, version 1.0.
:
: The box contained a collection of cassette tapes with tutorials recorded
: by Eric Damery and Ted Henter. Eric's voice is very familiar to JAWS
: users as he annually introduces the new features which are being added
: to new JAWS versions. Eric has participated in these recordings since
: the very beginning of JFW and, even in the 1.0 days, was a fabulous and
: professional presenter. I think the product was often referred to
: as JFW or JAWS for Windows more than it is today as Henter-Joyce wanted
: to distinguish it from the other JAWS product which ran on DOS machines.
: Once I listened to some of the tutorials, I installed the product onto
: my Windows 3.1 machine from the included 3.5 inch floppy disks, followed
: by the authorization key, also on a floppy, a form of copy protection I
: had previously never heard of and was having some difficulty wrapping my
: mind around. After all, in those days most software packages never had
: any sort of copy protection; you installed it and then used it.
: Well, the installation and authorization process went smoothly and, soon
: thereafter, I had JFW working with my trusty Bns 640. After all, for the
: most part we had no software-based synthesizers at that time and so you
: needed a bns, Accent, Artic, Audapter, Dec-talk or Doubletalk to get
: speech, with no Braille support at that time.
: They wanted JFW to feel like JAWS for DOS by giving it a PC cursor as
: well as a JAWS cursor. It included the insert-G hotkey to label graphics
: and the insert-T hotkey to read the window title, two features we didn't
: really need in DOS. Insert-down arrow was the "say all" key and the
: other keys on the numeric keypad tried to emulate what we were used to
: with JFD. I remember this first version crashing quite a lot but this
: was quickly fixed in an update which I probably downloaded from the
: Henter-Joyce BBS.
:
: If you're curious about what was added in JFW 2.0, you can go to their
: announcement on an old version of the Henter-Joyce home page, also
: courtesy of the Internet Archive.
: Those early versions would have seemed so limited to us compared to what
: we have today, but back then it was cutting-edge technology. The JAWS
: cursor could only move within the active window. When using the
: Internet, you had to press insert-f5 to reformat the page, which you
: read using the JAWS cursor. You couldn't freely navigate through a Web
: page using standard reading commands with the PC cursor the way you can
: with any screen reader today. If my memory is correct, that capability
: didn't get implemented until version 3.31. In fact, the ability to use
: single letter navigation keys, such as pressing H for heading or N to
: jump to the next block of text wasn't even implemented until a later
: version, probably around 3.5.
: What more can I say, except a happy 20th birthday to JFW, or JAWS as we
: now call it. JAWS has certainly come a long way in the past 20 years. I
: wonder what it will be like 20 years from now. I'm sure that it will be
: supporting Windows 43 or whatever OS Microsoft will have pushed out to
: us and we'll all have fond memories of running our screen readers on
: those ancient, primitive Windows 7 computers. It's too bad that the
: Internet Archive doesn't supply us with snapshots of pages from the
future.
: --
:
: Feel free to visit my new Web site
: http://www.DavidGoldfield.info
:
: From: Tom Lange <lange85@xxxxxxxxx>
: Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2015 21:04:56 -0800
:
: Hi,
: Boy, does that jog my memory. Back in 1996, I was using Winvision with an
: Artic Transport synth, and when I saw Windows 95 with JFW 2.0 I thought
that
: was just the best thing to come along. I then switched to a different
: machine and was running JFW 2.0 with a Dectalk PC1 synth.
:
: Wasn't it JFW 3.3 that finally introduced the Eloquence software
: synthesizer? That was pretty cool, too, except that the original
Eloquence
: always sounded really smug to my ears; something in its inflection.
:
: And then there was good old Doctor JAWS, who always made it a point to
: "diagnose" your system because if you didn't have the right video card
: installed, JFW would get deathly ill and do really crazy stuff, and, worst
: case, crash your system. Which brings to mind a funny situation where I
was
: showing JFW at a seminar at Braille Institute, and the vendor whom I was
: with installed a beta version just prior to the demonstration. Doctor JAWS
: "diagnosed" her laptop and promptly crashed her machine, whereupon I, in
my
: smart-aleck frame of mind at the moment, remarked that Doctor JAWS should
: really have been called Doctor Jack, as in Kevorkian. We both got a
: tremendous laugh out of that one, though Eric Damery, who was on hand to
: observe the proceedings, certainly wasn't at all amused. Be that as it
may,
: we got the situation resolved and the JFW demo was a resounding success.
:
: I'll stop my rambling, and close by saying screen reading technology,
: including JFW, has come a long way since then, and I, being the geek that
I
: am, can't wait to see what the future holds.
:
: Tom
:
: From: Jeff Kennyon <jkenyon7@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
: Date: Wed, 28 Jan 2015 06:50:12 -0500
:
: Has it really been so long? I also had Artic at home and Master Touch in
: high school which I graduated from in 1996. My first exposure to JAWS was
: that summer, and I wasn't too impressed with Windows I stuck with DOS for
a
: few more years and finally moved to Windows in 1999. I also had an
: imbarrising moment with JAWS and a demo. In 2001 I interviewed at
Motorola,
: and brought a long a demo version and it had already expired. I did
manage
: to show them the Keynote Companion Does anyone remember that? I used the
: Keynote to go on line with my old ISP, which sadly has been taken over by
: spammers.
:
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