The BRLTTY project started in July, 1995. The initial team consisted of Nikhil
Nair and James Bowden.
The first version ran with Blazie Engineering's Braille Lite. Since, at that
time, the Braille Lite wasn't designed to be a dedicated refreshable braille
display for a computer, its response time was far too slow. This situation has
now been corrected.
The second version, BRLTTY-0.22-BETA, was released in September of 1995. It was
the first to be released publicly. As well as the Braille Lite, it also
supported Tieman B.V.'s CombiBraille series.
James Bowden stopped being an active developer, although his continued help in
other areas (including documentation) was much appreciated. Two new members,
Nicolas Pitre and Stéphane Doyon, joined the team. They added support for Alva
and Telesensory Systems Inc. displays, as well as many excellent features for
the system as a whole.
A stable version (1.0) was released sometime around the end of 1996.
Support for Papenmeier displays was contributed by a team from The Technical
High School, Department of Electrical Engineering, Vienna, Austria. Support for
the TSI displays was completed, and support for the EuroBraille brand was
added. New features were also continually being added to the system.
Regretably, Nikhil Nair stopped working on the BRLTTY project. Nicolas Pitre
assumed the job of maintainer.
Version 2.0 was released during the summer of 1998, and version 2.1 was
released in March of 1999. It added support for EcoBraille (thanks to Oscar
Fernandez), Alva Delphi (thanks to Terry Barnaby), and Braille Lite 18 (from
Nikhil Nair), as well as Some small improvements and fixes.
Dave Mielke began to submit fixes and enhancements during 2000,
and joined the team as the next maintainer in June of 2001.
Mini Shell