Annie Easley: putting rockets into space

Annie Easley head and shoulders portrait — Annie Easley. NASA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Annie Easley was a pioneer both as a computer programmer but also as a champion of women and minorities into computer science. She went from being a human computer doing calculations for the rocket scientists (in the days before computers were machines), to becoming a programmer whose programs were integral to many NASA projects. Here work has helped us explore the planets and beyond, to put satellites into space and help humans leave the Earth. She also contributed to early battery technology as well as the alternative energy sources we now need to transition away from oil and gas. Throughout her career, despite being repeatedly discriminated against herself as an African-american woman, she encouraged, supported and mentored others like her.

Annie was a maths graduate so when she saw that computers were needed by NACA, the predecessor of NASA, she jumped at the chance. At the time a computer was a human who did calculations, as no machine at that point had been created to take over the job. She was one of only four African-american employees out of several thousand. Her job was to do the calculations researchers needed for their work. However, as digital computers started to be introduced – machines were now able to do large numbers of tedious calculations much more quickly than humans so took over the job…but now needed people who could program them for each task. To do so still needed mathematical ability to understand the task, as well as the ability to write code. She learnt both low level assembly language and the high level language, Fortran, invented for such scientific programming work and transitioned to being a programmer mathematician.

Much of her work involved or supported simulation, so writing programs that model aspects of the real world to test whether scientists predictions are correct, or to help make new predictions. Ultimately, this work would help provide the data to make choices of which technologies to use. Today computer simulation is a completely standard way of doing both engineering and science and has actually provided a completely new way to do science complementing theory and experiment. It allows us to probe everyday science questions but also big questions like exploring the origins of the universe or probing the long term consequences of our actions on the climate. Back then it was totally novel though, as computers were completely new. She was involved in simulation work that prefigured important work today around the environment, investigating systems to convert energy between different forms and so hybrid battery technology. It allows vehicles (whether a rocket, satellite, car or planetary rover) to switch between electric power and other sources of energy – an idea that has provided an important bridge from petrol to electric cars. She was also part of teams exploring alternative fuel sources like wind power and solar power (important of course now in space for satellites and planetary rovers, as well as a fossil fuel alternatives on Earth).

An Atlas rocket with centaur final stage launching — An Atlas rocket with centaur final stage. NASA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

One of her major areas of work, that has had a lasting impact, was on the Centaur rocket. Rocket launches involve multiple fuel tanks to get the payload (eg a satellite) into space. The tanks of each stage are ejected when their fuel runs out with the next stage taking over. Centaur was the final upper stage which used the then novel fuel of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen to propel the payload in the final step into space. Centaur became a mainstay for satellite launches as well as for probes sent to visit other planets – like Voyager (which visited the outer planets and is now in interstellar space heading away from the solar system having visited ) and Cassini–Huygens (which sent back stunning images of Saturn’s rings). Newer versions of Centaur are still used today,

At the same time as doing all this work she was also heavily involved in NASAs public engagement with science programmes, visiting schools and giving talks about the work, inspiring girls and those from ethnic minorities that STEM careers were for them. She also worked as equal employment opportunity counselor. This involved her helping sort out discrimination complaints (whether over age or race or gender) in a positive and cooperative way.

Space travel has opened up not only a new ability to explore our solar system, but made lots of other technologies from SatNav to remote monitoring possible as well has helped in the development of other technology such as battery technology and alternative energy sources. We all owe a lot to the pioneers like Annie Easley, and none more so than the private companies now aiming to further commercialise space.

– Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London

Magazines …

Issue 8 – Computer Science in Space

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This blog is funded by EPSRC on research agreement EP/W033615/1.

Torchwood: in need of some backup

Multiple floors of an abandoned building — Image by Peter H from Pixabay

***SPOILER ALERT***

Disaster planning, that’s the Torchwood game. They are there to save the Earth whenever it needs saving from aliens (which is every week). Shame they blew it when it came to disaster planning for Torchwood itself!

We are coming

Torchwood is the BBC’s cult spin-off from Doctor Who. In the series, Children of the Earth, the world is threatened by the mysterious and brutal ‘456’ whose arrival is heralded when every child in the world simultaneously stops in their tracks and chants ‘We are coming’. The Torchwood team of Captain Jack Harkness, Gwen Cooper and Ianto Jones once more spring into action. Unfortunately, early on a little accident (we won’t say what so as not to spoil it) happens in their base buried under Cardiff. On the run and homeless for a while, they have only their wits in place of the normal hi-tech surveillance gadgetry. It’s so desperate at one point, they end up in an empty shell of a warehouse with only a sofa and the contents of their pockets with which to save the world!

Move it!

It’s such a shame that it comes to this when a little bit of disaster planning would have made it all so much easier to beat the aliens. A backup plan including a backup site is crucial in dealing with a disaster, whether earthquake or Martian hordes. Just because your home city has been hit by a tsunami or flattened to the ground by a meteorite doesn’t mean your company’s operations have to be disrupted.

Captain Jack knows all about disaster management of course. Kill him, and after a brief period of pain he jolts back to life and carries on as though nothing has happened. With some standard forward planning any organisation ought to operate just like that too.

The fact that when the disaster happens the Torchwood team have to come up with solutions on the fly shows that they not only had no backup, but hadn’t even thought about it. Tut tut!

If they had done some planning, what would have been their alternatives?

Cold war

The first alternative, for those organisations that need to survive a disaster is to have a ‘cold site’ ready. In fact this is what Torchwood defaulted to in their warehouse. Lucky Ianto remembered it! A cold site is just a backup location that can be moved in to. It doesn’t have software, data or even hardware ready, but at least everyone knows what to do and where to go. In time it can be up and running again. Clearly given their remit of saving the Earth against war-hungry aliens, Torchwood needed something better than that.

Getting warmer

At the other end of the disaster planning spectrum is the ‘hot site’. It is a fully functioning copy of your main operations building. All the hardware is there, the software is there and so is the data. Everything that happens at the main site IT-wise is copied at the hot site too. Lose your main site to a nuclear bomb and you just carry on almost seamlessly at the hot site. (It obviously has to be located somewhere else suitably far away, not just next door, or it too will be as radioactively hot as the original and be of little use). You can also have ‘warm sites’ of different degrees where for example you just have the hardware installed, or the data backups are only weekly rather than continuously.

Which kind of backup site is chosen depends on the organisation: what can it afford balanced against the costs of downtime (and how much down time the business can take and still survive). If it is critical to the survival of the planet, like Torchwood, then clearly you need to be at the warmer end of the backup scale!

Back to life

It’s a shame then that Torchwood’s IT management only focused on installing lots of fancy gadgets and ignored the more mundane side of things. If they had been a little more competent Jack and co might have sorted out the ‘456’ before it all got out of hand. Never mind. It all worked out OK in the end. Well, sort of.

– Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London (from the archive)

Magazines …

Issue 24 – Cyber Security and Privacy

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This blog is funded by EPSRC on research agreement EP/W033615/1.

Moon and Mind-Body Dualism

**spoiler alert**

Two identical astronauts facing one another — Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay (duplicated by CS4FN)

The least interesting thing about Duncan Jones is who his superstar father is. He stepped out of the shadow with a vengeance in directing one of the coolest films ever: Moon. It premiered at Sundance in 2009 to brilliant reviews and for me is a classic along the lines of the likes of Silent Running, Outland and 2001. If you are interested in artificial intelligence (which Jones obviously is) then you will undoubtedly love Moon.

What’s most interesting about Duncan is that he finished off his degree in Philosophy by writing a dissertation on Artificial Intelligence. He obviously wasn’t quite so in to snappy titles then as now though as he called it: “How to kill your computer friend: an investigation of the Mind / Body problem and how it relates to the hypothetical creation of a thinking machine.”

What is the mind-body problem all about? Well, it’s probably one of the deepest problems computer scientists, along with philosophers, psychologists and neurobiologists, are grappling with. Its roots date back at least as far as Plato and it has been keeping philosophers in business ever since. It boils down to the question of whether our mind is a physical thing or not, and if not how can our mind affect the physical world at all. Descartes believed they were separate but interacted through the pineal gland – a pea sized gland in the brain. (He was wrong about the pineal gland incidentally. It actually produces melatonin which amongst other things controls sleep patterns). Descartes also thought that only humans, not animals, had both pineal glands and minds (He was wrong about that too, though I’m being a bit harsh on him, making him sound like a bit of a loser – he was pretty smart really, one of the greatest thinkers ever – honest.) A more interesting part of Descartes’ theory of mind and body dualism is that he suggested that the body works like a machine. That is of course where computer scientists get interested.

Fascinating an argument as that over dualism is, it was all a bit, well philosophical, until computers became a practical reality, that is. Suddenly it turned into an important question about what it is possible to engineer. Forget about the AI question of whether a computer can be intelligent. Dualism moves us on to worrying about whether a computer can ever have a mind. Could a computer ever become conscious and have a “self”? No one knows. No machine does either, right now.

After finishing his degree, Duncan actually flirted with studying for a PhD on Artificial Intelligence but packed it in to focus on film directing instead. He seems to have done an awful lot of searching for his “self” before finding his passion as a Director. Luckily for us though he has continued to explore the same philosophical themes in Moon.

It all concerns Sam Bell, who is left alone working at a base on the far side of the moon. He has only a robot called Gerty to keep him company on his three year stint. After an accident he comes across a doppelganger of himself. Is it the real him, or a clone the company have somehow created…? Is his “self” just losing the plot or is there more to his “self” than meets the eye?

Art as film can clearly be just as good a medium as a PhD thesis for exploring the philosophy of computation!

Oh and if you are really interested and didn’t hear from all the media fuss at the time, we will leave you to Google who his father is for yourself. This may be the first article ever written about Duncan Jones that doesn’t tell you!

– Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London (from the archive)

More on …

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This blog is funded by EPSRC on research agreement EP/W033615/1.

Bank holiday bunting!

Chain of bunting flags — Image adapted by PC based on one by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay

Bank holiday bunting appears automatically on the GOV.UK website thanks to a little program! If you’re reading this post today (Monday 21 April 2025) it’s Easter Monday which is a Bank Holiday in England & Wales and in Northern Ireland you have a chance to see it.

The UK Government’s website has a UK Bank Holidays page which lists all the upcoming dates for the next two years’ worth of bank holidays (so people can put them in the diaries) for England & Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland (the different UK nations share many but not all bank holidays).

But… if you visit the page on a Bank Holiday then you may be met with some bunting, which doesn’t appear if you visit the page on a non-bank holiday day. People who look after the website added in this little Easter egg* over a decade ago and people have been discovering it ever since. They use an Application Program Interface (API) which connects the bank holiday website to a database which lets the website check, whenever there’s a bank holiday, whether it should display bunting. For example Easter Monday is a celebratory day in the Christian calendar but Good Friday isn’t. Both are holidays but it wouldn’t be appropriate for bunting on Good Friday so it gets the instruction “bunting: false” whereas Easter Monday is “bunting: true”. You can see the API’s instructions here.

If you’re reading this post after Easter Monday 2025 you still have more chances to catch the bunting on the Early May bank holiday, the Spring bank holiday, though then you’ll need to wait until August for the Summer bank holiday then a few more weeks before Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Year’s Day and New Year’s Day – on those days the bunting changes to tinsel!

*it’s not called an Easter egg because it’s there at Easter, the bunting is there at other times too but because it’s something to discover (like Easter Egg Hunts – find ours at The CS4FN Easter Egg Hunt).

– Jo Brodie, Queen Mary University of London

This is an updated version of a snippet that appeared previously on this blog.

Part of a series of ‘whimsical fun in computing’ to celebrate April Fool’s (all month long!).

Find out about some of the rather surprising things computer scientists have got up to when they're in a playful mood.

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This blog is funded by EPSRC on research agreement EP/W033615/1.

Robot runners

Runner in big open landscape — Image from Pixabay

The first ever half marathon allowing humanoid robots to run against humans was held in Beijing this weekend (April 2025). 12,000 humans ran the event alongside 21 robots…and for now the humans definitely are the winners.

A robot called Tiangong Ultra, was the robot winner, one of 6 robots that managed to finish. It completed the half marathon in just over 2 hours, 40 minutes. The fastest human, for comparison, finished in 1 hour 2 minutes and Jacob Kiplimo, of Uganga holds the half-marathon world record at 56 minutes 42 seconds set in Feb 2025 in Barcelona. The first world record from 1960 being 1 hour 7 minutes. The robots, therefore, have a long way to go.

The robots struggled in various ways (see video link below) reminiscent of human runners such as over-heating and finding it hard to even keep standing (though for humans the latter usually only happens towards the end, not on the start line as with one robot!). While humans need to constantly take water and nutrients, the winning robot similarly needed several battery changes. It’s winning performance was put down to it copying the way that human marathon runners run by Tang Jian, chief technology officer from the Beijing Innovation Centre of Human Robotics who built it. It also has relatively long legs which also is certainly an advantage to human runners (given it had mastered standing in the first place on such long legs).

Totally autonomous marathon running is relatively difficult for a machine because it takes physical ability, including dealing with kerbs, rough road surfaces and the like but also navigating the course and avoiding other runners. In this race the robots each had a team of human ‘trainers’ with them, in some cases giving them physical support, but also for safety (though one took out its trainer as it crashed into the side barriers!)

So the robots still have to make a lot of progress before they take the world record and show themselves to be superhuman as runners (as they have already done in games including chess, go, poker, jeopardy and more). Expect the records to tumble quickly, though, now they have entered the race.

Of course, a robot does not need to run on 2 legs at all, apart from due to our human centred preferences. Whilst it is a great, fun challenge for robotics researchers that helps push forward our understanding, it is plausible that the future of robotics is in some other form of locomotion: centipede-like perhaps with hundreds of creepy crawly legs, or maybe we will settle on centaur-like robots in the future (four legs being better than two for stability and speed). After all evolution has only settled on 2 legs because it has to work with what came before and standing upright is a way to free up our hands to do other things…so if designing from scratch why not go for 4 legs and 2 arms.

So the future of robot marathons is likely to involve a large number of categories from centipedal all the way down to humanoid. Of course, expect robot Formula 1 for wheeled self driving robots too in any future robot olympics. Will other robots ever enjoy watching such sport? That remains to be seen.

Watch …

The humanoid robot half marathon [EXTERNAL]

Anne-Marie Imafidon’s STEMettes

*Anne-Marie Imafidon*: Image by Doc Searls, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Anne-Marie Imafidon was recently awarded the Society Medal by the British Computer Society for her work supporting young women and non-binary people of all ages into Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) careers.

Born and raised in East London, Anne-Marie became the youngest girl to pass A-Level Computing at the age of 11 and she was only 20 when she passed a Master’s degree in Maths and Computer Science from Oxford University! She went on to work in industry but realised there was a big problem in how few women there were both studying STEM subjects and so taking up careers, despite there being no good reason why they shouldn’t enjoy such subjects and careers.

Using her entrepreneurial skills, and industry contacts, she decided to do something about it. In 2013 she therefore founded STEMettes a social enterprise (a business aiming to do good for society rather than just make money like most companies). It aims to inspire and support young women and non-binary people in STEM now extended to STEAM so including the arts as well. Since then it has reached over 73,000 young people. They do this by running all kinds of events like programming hackathons solving real world problems in teams, STEAM clubs, panel sessions where women share and non-binary role people act as models sharing their experiences and advice, school trips to STEAM offices, run courses in programming and cyber security, run competitions and lots.

Anne-Marie has campaigned tirelessly for equity in the tech workplace, raising the profile of under-represented groups in industry and commerce so is a really deserving winner of the BCS award that recognises people who have made a major contribution to society.

– Jane Waite and Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London

This is an extended version of an article that first appeared on our Teaching London Computing Site.

Magazines …

Front cover of CS4FN issue 29 - Diversity in Computing

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This blog is funded by EPSRC on research agreement EP/W033615/1.

The CS4FN Easter Egg Hunt

Easter eggs can be chocolate but they are also hidden treasures to be found in games, websites, other software (and now even Lego sets). Especially for Easter we have hidden an Easter Egg in one of our diversity linked pages. Can you find it? Enjoy the hunt! (But if you do find it don’t give it away and spoil the fun for others. Just be quietly pleased at how clever you are!)

The term Easter Egg was coined after Warren Robinett hid the message “Created by Warren Robinett” in the Atari game, Adventure, that he created. He did it as part of a plan he hatched to protest against the Atari policy of the time of not crediting the developers of their games – supposedly so their best people wouldn’t get poached by rivals!! The real purpose of the game was to find a hidden chalice, but the hidden message could be found if the player’s avatar (a square block) stopped over one specific pixel (“the gray dot”) in one specific place in the game.

It was only found (by a player) after Warren had left the company (he hadn’t let on to the management what he had done even when he resigned). Originally the company scrambled to try to re-release the game without the message, but given how expensive that would have been to do, instead they turned it into a feature to whip up more excitement around their games and started to hide similar surprises in other games from then on, calling them Easter Eggs.

The Easter Egg was born.

Start your hunt for our Easter Egg here at our diversity portal.

As an aside, the wonderful book, Ready Player One by Ernest Cline is based on a plot around finding Easter Eggs. It is a must read for anyone interested in 1980s technology, easter eggs and what a metaverse might one day be actually like to live in. All computer scientists should read it (and only then watch the film which is good, but not as good.)

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This blog is funded by EPSRC on research agreement EP/W033615/1.

Hint – we think you will never see it without some help.

Bullseye! Mark Rober’s intelligent dart board

A dart in the Bullseye — Bullseye *Image by* Tim Bastian from Pixabay

Mark Rober, an engineer and YouTuber who worked for NASA, has created a dartboard that jumps in front of your dart to land you the best score. Throw a dart at his board and infra-red motion capture cameras track its path, and, software (and some maths) predicts where it will land. Motors then move the dartboard into a better position to up the score in real time!

To track the dart Mark used a motion-capture system with six cameras that respond to infrared instead of light (this let the cameras follow the movement of just the dart, which had a special infrared reflecting surface, and not all the other stuff in the room that would distract a light-sensing camera). He used Matlab to program the maths needed to calculate (very quickly!), from the parabolic path the dart was flying in, where it was about to land, so that the dart board could be moved into place and meet it. The movement of the darts board was controlled by fishing wire (literally) and small motors to pull the board left, right, up or down under the control of an Arduino.

Possibly the most ridiculously over-engineered thing but a lot of fun, even if a bullseye isn’t the highest possible score on a dart board (hitting the bullseye gives you 50 points but landing your dart in the triple 20 segment gives you 60!)

See the board in action in his YouTube video [EXTERNAL]

– Jo Brodie, Queen Mary University of London

Watch…

Mark Rober’s video of his Automatic Bullseye, moving dartboard [EXTERNAL]

Related Magazines …

Issue 28 – Cunning Computational Contraptions

An earlier version of this post originally appeared both on this blog and on the back page of issue 28 of the CS4FN magazine, Cunning Computational Contraptions, a fun look at the history of computational devices which you can download as a PDF from the link below.

This issue of the magazine contains articles about automata, core rope memory (used by NASA in the Moon landings), Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine (never built) and Difference Engine made of cog wheels and levers, mercury delay lines, standardising the size of machine parts, Mary Coombs and the Lyons tea shop computer, computers made of marbles, i-Ching and binary, Ada Lovelace and music, a computer made of custard, a way of sorting wood samples with index cards and how to work out your own programming origin story….

Part of a series of ‘whimsical fun in computing’ to celebrate April Fool’s (all month long!).

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This blog is funded by EPSRC on research agreement EP/W033615/1.

A Sea Hero Quest to understand our navigation skills

A lego minifigure hiking with map and compass — Image by Andrew Martin from Pixabay

Video games can be a very successful way to do citizen science, getting ordinary people involved in research. Sea Hero Quest is an extremely successful example. It involves a boy setting out on a sea quest to recover his father’s memories, lost when he suffers from dementia. The hundreds of thousands of people joining the quest have helped researchers better understand our ability to navigate.

The Sea Hero Quest project was led by Deutsche Telecom, working with both universities and Alzheimer’s Research UK. The first mass-market game of its kind, it has allowed researchers to explore navigation and related cognitive abilities of people throughout their lives. The game has 75 levels, each with different kinds of task in different environments, and has been played by millions of people around the world for over a 100 years of combined game time. The amount of data collected is vast and would have taken researchers centuries to collect by traditional means, if possible at all.

For example, an international team including researchers from UCL, the University of Lyon and the University of Münster used the game to explore how the place people grew up affects their ability to navigate. As well as more general data from around 400,000 people across the world, they also used the data specifically from people who had completed all levels of the game. This amounted to around ten thousand adults of all ages.

They found that people are best at navigating in situations similar to where they grew up (where they lived at the time of playing the game had no effect). So, for example, people who grew up in an American grid-like city such as Chicago, were better at navigating in grid-based levels. Those who grew up in cities such as Prague in Europe, where the streets are more wiggly and chaotically laid out, were better at levels needing similar navigation skills. Throughout, the researchers found that those that grew up in the countryside were better at navigating overall as well as specifically in more unstructured environments.

Sea Hero Quest shows that games designers, if they can create fun but serious games, can help us all help researchers…It is often said that playing video games is bad for growing brains but it also shows that the way we design our cities affects the way we think and can be bad for our brains!

Magazines …

Issue 29 – Diversity

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This blog is funded by EPSRC on research agreement EP/W033615/1.

Robert Weitbrecht and his telecommunication device for the deaf

Robert Weitbrecht was born deaf. He went on to become an award winning electronics scientist who invented the acoustic coupler (or modem) and a teletypewriter (or teleprinter) system allowing the deaf to communicate via a normal phone call.

A modem telephone: the telephone slots into a teletypewriter here with screen rather than printer. — A telephone modem: Image by Juan Russo from Pixabay

If you grew up in the UK in the 1970s with any interest in football, then you may think of teleprinters fondly. It was the way that you found out about the football results at the final whistle, watching for your team’s result on the final score TV programme. Reporters at football grounds across the country, typed in the results which then appeared to the nation one at a time as a teleprinter slowly typed results at the bottom of the screen.

Teleprinters were a natural, if gradual, development from the telegraph and Morse code. Over time a different simpler binary based code was developed. Then by attaching a keyboard and creating a device to convert key presses into the binary code to be sent down the wire you code type messages instead of tap out a code. Anyone could now do it, so typists replaced Morse code specialists. The teleprinter was born. In parallel, of course, the telephone was invented allowing people to talk to each other by converting the sound of someone speaking into an electrical signal that was then converted back into sound at the other end. Then you didn’t even need to type, never mind tap, to communicate over long distances. Telephone lines took over. However, typed messages still had their uses as the football results example showed.

Another advantage of the teletypewriter/teleprinter approach over the phone, was that it could be used by deaf people. However, teleprinters originally worked over separate networks, as the phone network was built to take analogue voice data and the companies controlling them across the world generally didn’t allow others to mess with their hardware. You couldn’t replace the phone handsets with your own device that just created electrical pulses to send directly over the phone line. Phone lines were for talking over via one of their phone company’s handsets. However, phone lines were universal so if you were deaf you really needed to be able to communicate over the phone not use some special network that no one else had. But how could that work, at a time when you couldn’t replace the phone handset with a different device?

Robert Weitbrecht solved the problem after being prompted to do so by deaf orthodontist, James Marsters. He created an acoustic coupler – a device that converted between sound and electrical signals – that could be used with a normal phone. It suppressed echoes, which improved the sound quality. Using old, discarded teletypewriters he created a usable system Slot the phone mouthpiece and ear piece into the device and the machine “talked” over the phone in an R2D2 like language of beeps to other machines like it. It turned the electrical signals from a teletypewriter into beeps that could be sent down a phone line via its mouthpiece. It also decoded beeps when received via the phone earpiece in the electrical form needed by the teleprinter. You typed at one end, and what you typed came out on the teleprinter at the other (and vice versa). Deaf and hard of hearing people could now communicate with each other over a normal phone line and normal phones! The idea of Telecommunications Device for the Deaf that worked with normal phones was born. However, they still were not strictly legal in the US so James Marsters and others lobbied Washington to allow such devices.

The idea (and legalisation) of acoustic couplers, however, then inspired others to develop similar modems for other purposes and in particular to allow computers to communicate via the telephone network using dial-up modems. You no longer needed special physical networks for computers to link to each other, they could just talk over the phone! Dial-up bulletin boards were an early application where you could dial up a computer and leave messages that others could dial up to read there via their computers…and from that idea ultimately emerged the idea of chat rooms, social networks and the myriad other ways we now do group communication by typing.

The first ever (long distance) phone call between two deaf people (Robert Weitbrecht and James Marsters) using a teletypewriter / teleprinter was:

“Are you printing now? Let’s quit for now and gloat over the success.”

Yes, let’s.

– Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London

Magazines …

Issue 29 – Diversity

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This blog is funded by EPSRC on research agreement EP/W033615/1.

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