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Draft:Fesseha Atlaw

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Fesseha Atlaw is an Ethiopian born American Engineer who pioneered digital Ethiopic/Ge'ez in the 80's. He is known worldwide for inventing the first usable Amharic word processor.

Fesseha Atlaw was born in Addis Ababa in 1963. His father was Atlaw Woldeyohannes and his mother was Hamere Gebretsadiq. He pursued formal education for 12 years in Kokebe Tsebah School formerly known as Emperor Haileselassie School.

Besides his academic accomplishments, he was an active participant in extracurricular activities. He was a member of music club, young authors club, Bible study group, radio and newspaper club.

He then joined Emperor Haileselassie University and started studying engineering. But, a politcal unrest ensued among the students and the university was closed. He began applying for scholarship in European and American Universities. He was accepted into a lot of universities but the only university which offered a full scholarship was the Oral Roberts university in Oklahoma. He received his undergraduate degree in Communication and Mathematics in 1983.

Then, he pursued and received two masters degrees in Biomedical Engineering & in System Engineering and Applied Mathematics from the university of Nebraska in 1986. He was granted a special visa to work in the USA. His company applied to the Ministry of Labor and he was granted a green card. He continued working for the company and started living permanently. During the last 40 years, he has worked for the following major companies:

1) FMC Corporation Automated Manufacturing Machine Programming (Robotics) 

2) ATARI : Manufacturing Engineering; Game console and personal Computers
3) Hewlett- Packard - Development Engineer/ScientistElectronic Power Conversion Systems

4) Agilent Technologies : Engineering Manager ; Microwave Test Instrumentation 5) Medtronic inc : Research and Development - Bio-Medical Devices Materials

In his spare and personal time:

1)Dashen Engineering Company - Founder and CEO

Using this company he founded, he pioneered digital Ethiopic. 

2 ) Ethiopian Famine Relief Organization - Chairman

During the 1984 Ethiopian famine, he chaired and coordinated the relief program among Ethiopians living in America which raised a considerable amount of money which was sent back home. He also helped with this initiative for the building of wells across the country.

3) Unicode Technical Symposium - Life time member

UNICODE is an international standard organization(ISO) which is founded to standardize scripts from all around the world. The members of this committee are from the world renowned companies like IBM, Apple, Amazon, HP, Microsoft, Adobe etc. Through this committee, Fesseha had successfully enabled Ethiopic characters to hold a permanent space in UNICODE.

4 ) Director : Fesseha Atlaw Wolde Yohannes Foundation Endowment

In 2020, Fesseha established a foundation in his family's name. Through this foundation he helps homeless youths and mothers. He hosts a yearly IT competition to help young software developers in Ethiopia.

Fesseha has a literary inclination apart from his engineering profession. At 12, he wrote and published a book. And at 15, he wrote a play which was performed in the country's biggest theatre venue, Hager Fiqir. The play attracted a lot of attention including Tsegaye Gebremedhin's. The Ethiopian Herald praised the play as "fabulous" and another paper, "Yeethiopia Dimits", interviewed him and printed a full page review of it.

When Fesseha came to the USA to pursue his education in Engineering, he held off his literary pursuits for the time being. After he was employed in his first job, he wanted an Amharic typewriter eminently to get back to his literary diversion and start writing. Unfortunately, it was difficult to get an Amharic typewriter during Mengistu Hailemariam's reign. Attempting to get one was considered as grave crime. He tried unsuccessfully to connect with the only Amharic typewriter producers,  Olivetti & Olympia. These producers were contracted obligatorily to sell the typewriters only in Ethiopia.

They say, "Necessity is the mother of invention." So, Fesseha decided to develop his own digital Ethiopic script.   At the time, Windows wasn't invented yet. Home computers weren't easily available. If they became available, they were usually very expensive. Fesseha rented the cheapest  computer(with 8086 processor)  and a dot matrix printer for a total price of $350 per month from IBM.

In 1980, he developed the first set of fonts but, it wasn't usable. For each character, he was obliged to develop different fonts for the screen and printer. This first attempt was just collection of fonts and wasn't matched to files. In 1981, he studied software and hardware applications related with Ethiopic. His first choice of hardware to develop Ethiopic script was Atari computers. In 1983, he shifted to HP. Then finally, 8086 architecture became the standard. And, this is what Fesseha used, to develop digital Ethiopic. In 1985, he has developed the first usable Ethiopic font.

The first big challenge was that there was no standard architecture. The dilemma to choose which architecture was trying. The choices were Atari, Commodore, Apple II or HP 150. Another major headache was that ASCII allows only 256 different characters. And, Ethiopian elites proposed Fesseha include all the +350 ge'ez characters. Some wide characters were not easy to design on an 8–bit pixel and led to poor resolution. For example, designing a font for characters like "ጬ" was difficult.

The other issue was the keyboard format. There were two options. Either use the standard Latin formatting or consider replicating the format on an Amharic typewriters. Finally, he decided on the second option as the primary standard and the others as custom.

Even though, development process was ongoing for long, he was not ready to make a demonstration until 1985. In USA, there's a football competition amongst Ethiopian communities held annually. That was where Fesseha made his first demonstrtation. The Ethiopians at this occasion showed interest for the digital script and wanted to buy their own copy. This was a huge incentive for Fesseha. In 1986 Dashen Engineering had provided Ethiopian Outreach Ministry with digital Ethiopic. The ministry had started at once to produce books and Gospel pamphlets. From then on, he had continued to provide digital Ethiopic for companies and individuals alike. Most of the transactions were free of charge but some paid in order to support the project. These endorsments were encouraging and helped Fesseha to strive for more.

Fesseha had given an interview for VOA in 1986/87. So, he was invited to Ethiopia to present his work. It was ambassador Kassa Kebede who invited him. They met when Fesseha was displaying digital Ethiopic in Stanford university. Ministry of Science and Technology had also invited Fesseha. So, he accepted the invitation and made a demonstration at Hilton Hotel around late eighties. In this demonstration, Mengistu Hailemariam appeared suddenly. Ambassador Kassa introduced them and Fesseha explained about the digital script to Mengistu. Mengistu was impressed and encouraged him. After this, Fesseha gave an interview to Ethiopia radio and TV.

The turning point in the development of digital Ethiopic came when the United States government contracted a deal with Xerox company through VOA. They made a contact to design digital scripts for multiple languages including Amharic. For the project to succeed, Fesseha cooperated with Dr. Becker effectively. Doctor Joe Becker is the founder of UNICODE. Unicode is an industry  standard whose goal is to provide the means by which text of all forms and languages can be encoded for use by computers. Ethiopic was included in Unicode in 1990. Members are recruited from well known international companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook,  Amazon, IBM, Apple etc. Fesseha is the only African member of Unicode.

When Fesseha joined Unicode in the beginning of the 90s, he successfully enabled the approval of the renaming of the script as ethiopic rather than ge'ez or Amharic. He said, "I've consulted with Ethiopian linguists. This has a couple of connotations: The first is that the script would always be associated with Ethiopia. Also, it denotes that the script belongs to all Ethiopians.

The digitalization of ethiopic has multiple ramifications. One of them is OCR. OCR is a relatively new technology. The computer takes pictures of each characters and compares it with Unicode scripts. This has multiple applications. Ancient books could be scanned and transformed into searchable text.

Also, the computer would be able to read us the text with voice. The user can also instruct the computer.

Fesseha has given countless interviews to different media and explained about his software. For instance, he was interviewed by VOA,  Ethiopian radio and TV, Tadias magazine and Sheger FM 102.1 among others. The most recent of them was the one he had with Meaza Birru of Sheger FM which lasted for four weeks. He gave the interview when he travelled to Ethiopia in 2019. He has also published the biography of his father during this time.

References

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