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.