Episode 102 of Freedom Scientific's FSCast podcast reminds us that 2015 
marks the 20th anniversary of the JAWS for Windows screen reader. In 
fact, Jonathan Mosen reminds us that January is, in fact, the month in 
which JAWS turned 20. I remember installing and using JFW 1.0 back in 
January of 1995 and I thought I'd dedicate this short blog post to some 
of my early memories of that product and of that time in general.
In 1995, I was working for Blazie Engineering providing technical 
support. Windows 3.1 was a fairly well-established operating system with 
several Windows screen readers already available, including Blazie's own 
Windows Master which I believe was already out at that time. While I had 
used Windows 3.1 and was familiar with it on a very basic level, I was a 
dedicated DOS user. While I was very familiar with Vocal-eyes and JAWS 
for DOS, ASAP from Microtalk was my screen reader of choice, along with 
a trusty Braille 'n Speak as my speech synthesizer.
It was during the end of 1994 or the very beginning of 1995 when we 
received our boxed copy of JAWS for Windows 1.0, with January 19, 1995 
being the official launch date of that product. If you really want to 
read a piece of classic assistive technology history, you can, courtesy 
of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, read the December 1994 
Henter-Joyce newsletter which, among other things, contains the big 
announcement regarding JFW 1.0.
Around this time, I found out that I had enlarged tonsils which needed 
to be removed. As I constantly used my voice to do my job, it was 
recommended that I stay home for two weeks during my recuperation. This 
was, I decided, the perfect time to finally dive into Windows 3.1 with 
our new copy of JAWS for Windows, version 1.0.
The box contained a collection of cassette tapes with tutorials recorded 
by Eric Damery and Ted Henter. Eric's voice is very familiar to JAWS 
users as he annually introduces the new features which are being added 
to new JAWS versions. Eric has participated in these recordings since 
the very beginning of JFW and, even in the 1.0 days, was a fabulous and 
professional presenter. I think that the product was often referred to 
as JFW or JAWS for Windows more than it is today as Henter-Joyce wanted 
to distinguish it from the other JAWS product which ran on DOS machines.
Once I listened to some of the tutorials, I installed the product onto 
my Windows 3.1 machine from the included 3.5 inch floppy disks, followed 
by the authorization key, also on a floppy, a form of copy protection I 
had previously never heard of and was having some difficulty wrapping my 
mind around. After all, in those days most software packages never had 
any sort of copy protection; you installed it and then used it.
Well, the installation and authorization process went smoothly and, soon 
thereafter, I had JFW working with my trusty Bns 640. After all, for the 
most part we had no software-based synthesizers at that time and so you 
needed a bns, Accent, Artic, Audapter, Dec-talk or Doubletalk to get 
speech, with no Braille support at that time.
They wanted JFW to feel like JAWS for DOS by giving it a PC cursor as 
well as a JAWS cursor. It included the insert-G hotkey to label graphics 
and the insert-T hotkey to read the window title, two features we didn't 
really need in DOS. Insert-down arrow was the "say all" key and the 
other keys on the numeric keypad tried to emulate what we were used to 
with JFD. I remember that first version crashing quite a lot but this 
was quickly fixed in an update which I probably downloaded from the 
Henter-Joyce BBS.
If you're curious about what was added in JFW 2.0, you can go to their 
announcement on an old version of the Henter-Joyce home page, also 
courtesy of the Internet Archive.
Those early versions would have seemed so limited to us compared to what 
we have today, but back then it was cutting-edge technology. The JAWS 
cursor could only move within the active window. When using the 
Internet, you had to press insert-f5 to reformat the page, which you 
read using the JAWS cursor. You couldn't freely navigate through a Web 
page using standard reading commands with the PC cursor the way you can 
with any screen reader today. If my memory is correct, that capability 
didn't get implemented until version 3.31. In fact, the ability to use 
single letter navigation keys, such as pressing H for heading or N to 
jump to the next block of text wasn't even implemented until a later 
version, probably around 3.5.
What more can I say, except a happy 20th birthday to JFW, or JAWS as we 
now call it. JAWS has certainly come a long way in the past 20 years. I 
wonder what it will be like 20 years from now. I'm sure that it will be 
supporting Windows 43 or whatever OS Microsoft will have pushed out to 
us and we'll all have fond memories of running our screen readers on 
those ancient, primitive Windows 7 computers. It's too bad that the 
Internet Archive doesn't supply us with snapshots of pages from the future.
-- 

Feel free to visit my new Web site
http://www.DavidGoldfield.info


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