Research and Advances

A controller for a braille terminal

Anderson and Rogers [1] have described a set of modifications which convert a standard model 33 tele-type into a device which produces embossed braille characters. Thus, blind computer users can communicate with a computer without the help of a sighted person to read the output. The disadvantage of this terminal alone is that either the applications program or the operating system of the host computer must have special software to map each output character into a sequence of three characters necessary to emboss its braille equivalent. Such software modification can be expensive and has to be done for each applications program or operating system the blind person wants to use.

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Research and Advances

TALL—a list processor for the Philco 2000 computer

Several of the computer languages that are oriented toward problems in symbol manipulation use a list type of memory organization.1 The advantages of such a memory organization have been discussed elsewhere and will not be repeated here. The purpose of this note is to describe the method used in realizing a list language on the Philco 2000. Information Processing Language V (IPL-V) was chosen as the source language for the list processor for the 2000 because this language has been well documented and has been implemented on several computers.2 Heretofore, IPL-V has been implemented as an interpretive system. The interpretive system has three major components: (1) a loader which translates card images into internal machine words; (2) an interpreter which decodes instructions; and (3) a set of primitive processes, the “J's,” which make up the bulk of the instruction vocabulary. The implementation of such an interpretive system has been a rather lengthy procedure usually estimated as taking six man-months.

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