[DECtalk] Looking for Blazie notetaker stuff

[Piotr Machacz]

Hi all,
This may be slightly OT for the 2 lists I’m sending this too, but it does relate to old technology somewhat so I hope the mods will let it slide. And you can reply off-list to avoid more clutter.

I want to start a site with a friend which aims to preserve the history of old blind assistive technology. Among other things, that’s probably where talking dosbox will have a permanent home, but we also want to put up any additional software, manuals, hardware descriptions and even audio/video demos for people who may not have said hardware but are curious. Information is slowly disappearing. Some companies, like Robotron, were actually quite helpful and sent my friend the Eureka A4 manuals via E-mail. Others like GW micro actually took their FTP site down when people started to enquire about programs like vocal eyes a few years ago. Freedom scientific also have sort of gotten rid of anything before JAWS 10 from their site after the redesign, though the files are still up on their FTP and can be a accessed if you view an archive.org version of the FS page. 
So what I’m looking for is various software for Blaze note takers. You can still find some stuff, like the 2003/2004 firmware, plus a few demos for the graphing calculator, and the basic compiler and interpreter with a lot of games, but a lot of stuff that used to be on Blaze’s ftp site is now nowhere. For example, I know that they released a free metronome program. We are also looking for any firmware files, especially in other languages. The ONCE has an FTP site where you can download the spanish firmware for the BNS and Braille lite, but I haven’t been able to find any other languages even though I know there’s way more, probably because you used to have to pay for it.

Lastly, and this is probably the biggest longshot, does anyone have the blazie note taker SDK? I’m not referring to the basic compiler, while looking through an archive.org version of the Blazie site I found information that you could get an SDK that allowed you to program for the note takers in C.

Again sorry for the somewhat OT post, I will now return you to whatever you were doing before.