Deafnet

Deafnet started as an attempt by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare to bring awareness to the deaf population of the advantages of electronic mail. Ultimately, it would reach beyond that goal to one of introducing pilot email systems to be operated by deaf organizations and individuals themselves. Funded in 1978, the SRI project first built a demonstration system that was installed at Gallaudet University in Washington DC, the nation's university for the deaf. The email system offered service to both ASCII and Baudot terminals as well as direct conferencing for up to four clients. Handling both modems was made possible by the clever engineering of SRI's Russ Wolfram who designed an "intelligent" modem that automatically determined the type of signal being received at the server. The email software was a modified version of that in use on the Department of Defense's ARPANET.

The number of users at Gallaudet and in surrounding Washington DC was small. Again, taking advantage of the emerging ARPANET, the network and email coverage expanded to include mail hosts at Boston and SRI as early as September 1979. Later in the project, smaller, more affordable computer systems were designed to fit the budgets of the deaf community, yet a bigger population was needed to share capital and operating costs.

To have the email service succeed in the deaf community it was considered essential for the businesses to be owned and operated by deaf people. The Government primed each set-up by providing equipment and paid SRI and others to train staff and help keep it running for a while. Those who volunteered to start and operate the service were pioneers in this fledgling technology of electronic mail. SRI, under HEW sponsorship, assembled systems for nine metropolitan areas around the country in a dissemination phase. This phase was less successful than the demonstration project for several reasons: the constraint by the Federal Government that the system become self-supporting before there was a sufficient user base; the high variability and poor reliability of the old teletypewriters as computer peripherals; the requirement for continuous 24-hour service; some marginally high operating costs; and adoption by the deaf community was not as enthusiastic as hoped.

SRI's Deafnet project was conducted by a multidisciplinary team. Teresa Middleton, from SRI's social science group and whose daughter was deaf, became the project leader. The latter stages of the handheld terminal development and the majority of the Deafnet projects benefited enormously from another SRI deaf person, computer programmer Ken Harrenstein who became the lead technical person on the design of the Deafnet email system.

A number of portable TDDs were developed after the SRI device had been publicized.

The largest impact of Deafnet was creating awareness within the deaf community of the emergence of new technologies from which they would benefit.