Throwback Thursday Object: the Portabraille, one of the first refreshable Braille displays

I was looking through our catalog of previous entries
to this blog this morning, searching for inspiration, but the little box to my
right could not be ignored. It is one of Wayne Thompson and Fred
Gissoni’s original PortaBraille machines, and it has an interesting
story. We lost Fred about
eighteen months ago, so I can’t call him up any more and get some
additional—and usually very funny!—scoop. That continues to be a great
loss to us all. (You can read more about Fred in a previous Fred's Head post http://www.fredshead.info/2010/03/fred-gissoni.html). I
hope everyone is excited about the new low cost refreshable braille display
that will soon come out, the Orbit
Reader 20. Our story comes from the time before refreshable braille
devices were very common at all. In the mid-1980s, you only had a few
choices: the Elinfa
Digicassette and the Telesensory
Versabraille were just about the only game in town. Both stored their
input on audio cassette tapes although later they c…