OLD DAYS

[jwantz at hpcc2.hpcc.noaa.gov]

Hi Again,
This is NOT correct.  There were 3 screen reading programs written for 
the c-64!  I don't even remember the name of the first program I used,, 
but it worked off of a cartridge that you plugged into the cartridge 
slot and produced a software synthesized voice.  That one didn't work 
very well--it only ran a few programs.  Then there was Eric Bohlmann's 
product, that had a screen reader that you had to load in with a load 
command from a disk.  Once it was loaded, you would remove the disk and 
proceed normally.  It came with a keypad and a synthesizer.  Then you 
would insert whatever disks you wanted and load the programs.  I would 
guess that it worked with about 60% of the commercial software 
available.  Then Eric made a cartridge version that worked on about 80% 
of the commercially available software which was really amazing for that 
time.  He also had written a terminal program that used a whopping 40K.  
Also, I wrote my first C code on a very optimizing K&R C compiler.  The 
only problem was that it took about 15 minutes and 5 disk removals to 
compile a simple program.  The reason I got a PC was so that I could 
compile C programs faster and the fact that all of the C books at that 
time were either using UNIX examples  or DOS examples.

     Jim Wantz WB0TFK
On Thu, 23 May 2002, 
Toby Fisher wrote:

> On Wed, 22 May 2002, Alex Snow wrote:
> 
> > Yeah lots of it was in rom, but not enough to boot without a disk with
> > software on it.  Thats why there wasn't any screen reader for those
> > machines, just talking programs.
> 
> That's right, there was a speech synth that you plugged into a socket at
> the back, I still have one at my parents' place.  You could write your own
> programs to talk under the C64, but to make them speak, you had to put
> slashes everywhere, and other stuff to get the pauses right and stuff,
> very weird.
> 
> Cheers.
> 
>