Background Information
Some e-mails we have received have suggested that Duxbury Systems was not supporting MegaDots. The following is a personal statement by David Holladay about how Duxbury Systems has been supporting MegaDots.
MegaDots has never paid for itself at Duxbury Systems. The time that Caryn, Peter, myself, and others have put into MegaDots, as well as other costs have never paid for itself at Duxbury. Now MegaDots has been at Duxbury for twice as long as it was at Raised Dot. Even at Raised Dot, MegaDots was not paying all the bills. The collapse of Raised Dot Computing was due to the implosion of a side project (which would have helped support MegaDots).
So Duxbury has carried MegaDots for 16 years. That shows an amazing commitment to braille and to braille transcribers. When a major vendor of a subcomponent of MegaDots wanted $50,000 to allow continued use of their software, Duxbury Systems worked out an ambitious scheme to incorporate the file importation software of DBT. There is virtually a whole DBT in every copy of MegaDots 2.5. There are two Windows-based methods for embossing which have been added into MegaDots as well. One of the reasons MegaDots continues to run so well so long after it was first created in Madison WI is all the bits and pieces we have grabbed from DBT.
While there is sadness about not being able to continue supporting MegaDots much longer, we would like to take the lessons of MegaDots and apply these to working out ways to improve DBT to make it a more efficient tool for braille transcription.
Copyright Duxbury Systems, Inc. Tuesday, November 30, 2021
