Before the development of PED-30 around 1980, the world's Braille printing houses produced plates for Braille presses literally by hand. One error, and the whole plate had to be redone. , , The PED-30 revolutionized volume Braille production by making it possible to create zinc master plates from computers. Plates from the PED-30 go onto a specially modified commercial printing press, which stamps the dots into the paper. Today, plates from the PED-30 regularly produce millions of pages of Braille worldwide, including every sheet of Braille produced for the Library of Congress' huge stock of Braille books and periodicals.