Kurzweil Computer Products

~ the goodbye ~

The press conference was on 13 january 1976 and the National Federation of the Blind was standing next to it. All three American networks put the machine on the evening news, and on CBS it read Walter Cronkite's own sign-off out loud after he had said it. Stevie Wonder saw the segment that night, called, and walked out with the first production unit. It is difficult now to reconstruct how strange that was. A box the size of an appliance, and a voice reading out whatever was printed on the sheet of paper you had laid face down on its glass.

Kurzweil Computer Products was founded in 1974 for one problem. Character recognition already existed by then, but it worked on a single typeface at a time, trained in advance, which meant it could read bank forms and nothing else. The company went after omni-font recognition instead: any typeface, no training. Solving it needed two other pieces that barely existed, a flatbed scanner built around a CCD to get the page into the machine, and a speech synthesizer good enough that a person could listen to it for an hour without giving up.

Three separate firsts came out of one product, and the product was aimed at blind readers before it was aimed at anybody with money. That ordering is worth sitting with. Optical character recognition, the technology that later scanned every corporate filing cabinet in the world, was commercialized as an accessibility device and the office market was the side effect.

The reading machines cost tens of thousands of dollars each and sold to institutions rather than to individuals, which is not a business that funds its own research. By 1978 the company needed outside money and Xerox put some in. In 1980 Xerox bought the whole thing for six million dollars.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it became ~

The name survived the acquisition by eight years as a Xerox division. What ended it was another purchase: Xerox announced in may 1988 that it was buying Datacopy, a Palo Alto scanner company, for 31 million dollars in stock, and in october it folded Datacopy into the Kurzweil division and called the result Xerox Imaging Systems. Two pioneering scanner companies went into one org chart and neither name came out.

What came after is a long chain of owners. The recognition software became TextBridge, the division became ScanSoft, Visioneer bought ScanSoft from Xerox in 1999 and took its name, ScanSoft merged with Nuance in 2005, and Microsoft bought Nuance in 2022. Ray Kurzweil started a separate company in 1996 to keep making reading technology for the blind, which is the only part of the lineage still doing the original job.

~ the long tail ~

Every OCR package I have ever used has had to be argued with about Turkish. The dotted and dotless i are two different letters here and most engines were built by people for whom they are one letter with an optional dot, so scanned Turkish comes back with words that are almost right. That is the exact problem Kurzweil's people were working on in 1974, just moved sideways: a system that reads what it was trained to expect rather than what is on the page.

The reading machine itself did not disappear so much as dissolve into the phone. Recognition and a voice are now a free item in the accessibility settings of every handset, and nobody calls it a product. In 1976 the same thing cost as much as a house and was worth every cent to the people who could get near one.

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