“You know how Steve Jobs came across as one mean man? Well, he was exactly that with his Apple. He would not send us the code that he used to generate characters. The reason that he had to send us the code is that there wasn’t enough room to put the vowels on Laotian and Vietnamese languages. If we tried to write the letters, there was no room for vowels. So they told us no, twice. We decided, well, we’ll write our own character generator. We were so naïve.
“So I paid the kids $1.50 an hour and when school ended at 3:15, we’d all get on our hands and knees and try to decode their coding for the machine language of the Apple, the zeroes and ones. We took a year and a half sitting on our knees, looking at the zeroes and ones, from one end of the building to the other. It was an atrocious job. And, believe it or not, the kids caught on. [We had committees doing certain things] and we had a committee for code generation for providing another character generator was making progress. In those days, there was such limited room on the discs that we saved coding on to do a program. Nowadays, you have space for thousands of pieces of information, but you didn’t have that in those days.
“So we went to the Art Department and got their best artist and he made images that were so beautiful about what we needed and at the same time, he used up less space than you can even imagine. Your eyes filled in what he didn’t fill in. So he drew our pictures of the truck and the truck driver — just everything we needed — because we had room for the pictures of the things we were teaching. What we didn’t have is room for the language, so they could understand the translation. So one group worked on getting the English part done; one group worked on getting all the pictures done. One group was working on how the devil we were going to program the language.
“Well, all good things come to an end and we finished it and started implementing that group’s work to go with the translations. We had, at that time, I’m sure, the only word processor in the world for Laotian and Vietnamese. Hmong doesn’t have a written language. The schools, in applying for this, and the government, in accepting our application, did not know there was no written language for Hmong students. It was only oral. And Spanish. So I was running out of money, so what I did was put up the programs for bid. They would bid, not a $1.50 an hour, but they would bid what they were willing to do to get this particular program finished, a part of it. There were like twenty lessons in each program we were putting in the computer.
“I learned about work by committee pretty fast and we got it to work. We taped the keys for the various letters — characters — on the keyboard of the Apple and made our program. When a Hmong, Vietnamese, or Laotian kid entered the building, he came in and spent the whole day on our computer — one of the four computers that was given to us for the program. We learned very fast that it doesn’t take those kids long to recognize the English representation of truck, driver, meal, desert, steak, whatever the devil we were talking about, and the program worked very well. We told the government that anybody who wanted it, we would send them everything they needed to use it for $400. It was a three-year research project; most of the time was spent on trying to write our own character generator. The only other place that had one, that the government allowed, was at the University of Iowa. Mostly universities get these grants; not high schools. And they were willing to sell it for $10,000 and we were selling it for $400.”