Thunder Dog by Michael Hingson Page A

hosting and producing Planetary Radio , which covers everything related to space travel. One time he scraped up a hundred dollars, a lot of money for starving college students in those days, and ordered a small helium-neon laser from Edmund Scientific, the wonderful old mail-order science and gadget supply house that is still around. Back in the ’70s, lasers were not yet widely available at every local drugstore like they are now. Mat and I had a great time playing with the laser, and we immediately noticed how my guide dog Holland was mesmerized by the bright laser pinpoint light and loved to chase it. We sent him into a frenzy chasing the laser around a big room by the radio station. The laser was so powerful, though, that we had to be careful. We didn’t want to injure the dog’s eyes by accident. But my eyes—that was a different story. Without giving Mat any warning, one time I picked up the laser and flashed the beam straight into my eye.
    “Funny, I don’t see anything,” I deadpanned.
    “Mike, Mike, don’t do that!” yelled Mat, frantic. I think that was the last time he let me play with the laser.
    Although desktop and laptop computers were still far in the future, UC Irvine had a mainframe computer. In the ’60s, most mainframes accepted input from system operators via punched cards, paper or magnetic tape, or Teletype devices, which looked something like an IBM Selectric typewriter or the bulky old printers you used to see in newsrooms. By the ’70s, at universities like Irvine, mainframes had interactive user interfaces and operated as time-sharing computers “talking” to many individual users as well as doing batch processing.
    These were exciting times for physics students, as we were required to do extremely complex mathematical equations. The school computer could do calculations in a few seconds that would take us hours, and we were only at the beginning of understanding how computers could be used in the world outside the university walls.
    But there was a problem. I couldn’t use the computer even though I knew how to type. The Teletype had a standard QWERTY keyboard, but there was no way for me to read the display on the screen or decipher the output when it was printed out. I was virtually locked out of the computer age. I needed some help. John Halverson, another blind student a year ahead of me, also wanted access, so together we appealed to the powers that be for some technology to allow us to use the computer.
    Enter Dick Rubinstein, a wunderkind graduate student and researcher at UCI working with Julian Feldman, head of the computer science program. Julian asked Dick to help us, and we immediately hit it off. It was an era when many college students were taking up political activism and making their voices heard, and John and I were no different. We came up with a phrase for our computer-access lobbying project. We took the popular slogan “Power to the People” and gave it a twist: “Blind Power.” We had a great time joking around about our own civil rights movement, and Dick joined right in.
    Then he got to work and whipped up a Braille terminal for us. Dick was an engineer who describes himself as “a generalist.” He had just graduated from Caltech in engineering but had shifted gears at Irvine to study social sciences. Dick loves to make and fix things and has an innate understanding of how equipment works. He also loves people, and his sense of design comes from an understanding of what people need. He started with a Teletype machine that printed with a type cylinder that rotated and pressed against a ribbon to make marks on paper. It printed at only ten characters a second, very slow. Dick designed a new cylinder and installed pins to emboss the dots needed to create Braille marks along with a number of other modifications needed to put the paper in the right position to receive the marks. Then he wrote a software program to run on a Digital PDP-8 minicomputer to