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Jim Allan
Surprisingly, I started out in mechanical engineering and was in Navy ROTC and was going
to be in specifically nuclear engineering and was going to be on submarines. And then
I found out I had a cellular level problem with authority! And a friend who, as I was
working at Jack in the Box at the time, had a friend who decided that he was going to
be an orientation and mobility specialist. And working graveyard was not conducive to
engineering school. I worked from 10 to 6 and then go to class at 8 o’clock and do
engineering just…it doesn’t work well. And so basically I was on scholastic probation
and you know, said I think I’ll sit out for a semester and figure out what it is I’m
going to do, and started volunteering with the adults. And said, oh, well this is interesting,
and the School for the Blind was right across the street so I did some volunteer work there
which landed a job in residential – in the deaf/blind program which back in the ‘70s
was pretty much because of the rubella epidemic that had hit right about then in the late
‘60s, early ‘70s. And I thought, you know, this is fun! I can do this! And it just
so happened that the University of Texas had a vision program. That was a great thing so
I started going there and ended up becoming a teacher of the visually impaired. So I graduated
in ’78 and became an itinerant teacher of the visually impaired. You know, have car
will travel, and went to a district just north of Austin, Texas called Round Rock. And I
was there for almost ten years and in that ten years we went from 1200 students in the
district to 12,000 students in the district. But the vision teachers never changed. There
were just two of us. Also the thing that happened was in ’78 was the year that the Apple IIe
came out, and the Echo, and so we jumped on that technology and Telesensory came out with
the Versabraille. Previously they’d come out with the Opticon and the speech plus calculator
and so I had training on the Opticon in college and went through all of that training. In
the school district…so we had the Apple IIe and you know, all the schools were doing
a lot of those. And we had the first Braille embosser which was the…what was that thing
called? It was called a Perky; Perkins Modified Brailler, and it was a Perkins Brailler that
had all this electronics and mechanics in the bottom and you could roll in one piece
of paper and it had a serial interface to the Apple and then it would make a loud sound
and spit out one piece of paper and then you’d roll in another one. There was no tractor
feed; there was none of that. And that was a vast amount of money. It cost more I think
than the Apple did.