Operating systems and the way we use computers have changed dramatically over the past 30 years.
And yet some core elements remain relevant today.
Many of us grew up with MS-DOS and may never have completely lost our love for the command line.
And sometimes, even today, you come across a handy Windows 11 terminal command that makes certain tasks extremely easy. For example, Winget, which makes installing, updating, and uninstalling programs a breeze.
“winget list,” for example, displays all installed programs along with their IDs. Really super handy!
It gets interesting when you use voice output instead of a Braille display: names and IDs are not so clearly separated and often have to be determined with some effort. On a Braille display, on the other hand, it is much faster and clearer.
Peter from Slovakia addresses this very topic of input-based systems in conjunction with Braille displays in his article today.
Without a Braille display, his work would be almost impossible, and those of you who occasionally like to work with the command line will surely agree with him.
Many thanks to Peter for his wonderful text, which shows that some things may be getting old, but are never really old.
Sometimes it is really too few to rely on our ears to operate the machine.
My first contact with Braille in terminals was back in elementary school in Brno. At that time, we had two computers with MS DOS, to which 80-character braille displays were connected. That was back in the days when we couldn’t even dream of Windows, and having a sound card in a PC was almost as rare as having that braille display. At that time, I played around with Borland Pascal on the braille display, and we created some programs with our math teacher, based on a book.
Much later in my life, I encountered a PC with a braille display at the support center for visually impaired students at Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Informatics of Comenius University in Bratislava. There, too, there were still computers with DOS, but we were already dabbling with a Linux machine via telnet. I have fond memories of those times; it was a period of intense learning and discovery.
In college, I already had my own braille display (Tieman Braille Voyager – I still have it and it works), which I used on the console and in Windows. On the console, I mostly used Borland Pascal or C++ Editor for math calculations (which I also preferred to do in Pascal Editor :-)), later in a special application (called CL – Clausal Language), which we used for formal proof of various mathematical statements and later for the correctness of algorithms (a three-semester course), which was also written as a DOS console application. Well, at that time, I was already working as a system administrator, and the command line saved my neck every time something happened to the machines I was taking care of that prevented me from connecting to them remotely. I had BRLTTY running on every machine, which started very early during machine bootup. At that time, I also had a boot disk with a light Linux distribution on which I ran BRLTTY so that I could work miracles whenever necessary.
So what about today? My Braille Voyager is now (like me) getting on in years, but still (like me) in good shape. 🙂 I still connect it to servers when everything else fails. I recently programmed Braille display support into our Android app, and before I got the Bluetooth-enabled display, I tested my code with the Braille Voyager connected to my phone via USB. Ah, but that’s another story, it’s not a console anymore, even though Linux runs in the background of Android.
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