ancient speech synthesizers

[Chuck Hallenbeck]

Tyler,

My own ancient DOS screen reader, provox, was written in about 1984, 
before there was an artic technologies, and supported the Votrax 
external monster, the Echo GP, and a cute little box called the Intex 
Talker. The Intex Talker had both a serial and a parallel interface like 
the Litetalk, but you could use them both at once. I used it for a while 
with the serial line on one machine and the parallel line on another. 
Talk about confusion! 

We next supported the Votrax Vocoder IB (Internal Board) which was the 
predecessor of the first Artic internal board, and had much better 
speech quality than the latter. We also supported the Artic boards, but 
Artic got pissed at us because we were not buying their software along 
with their boards, so that was that. 

But my favorite ancient device was the original Votrax board made for 
hobby computers in the late 1970's. It had a ponderous and intimidating 
electronic voice reminiscent of science fiction movies of the day, such 
as the Forbin Project. I paid $3,000 for my first computer in 1977, 
which came with 2,048 bytes of memory, expanded to 26K with three 8K 
memory boards, and a Votrax VS/1 synthesizer. After it arrived, I found 
out there was no software to support the speech! None. Nothing whatever. 
So I had to write it.  Within a year I had myself a talking terminal on 
our campus time sharing system.

There was also a board called the Synthetalker, which I had in an old 
Zenith Z-100 system, a dual boot system which ran CP/M and a DOS which 
Zenith called Z-DOS, a superior product to the "new kid on the street", 
MS-DOS, and the rest, as you know, is history.

Chuck


On Mon, Oct 09, 2006 at 08:35:14PM -0700, Tyler Spivey wrote:
> Just out of curiosity, what have any of you used for ancient synths? I'm
> not talking the well-known ones such as accent/artic, I'm talking
> something like Votrax anything, Covox, or any ones that are strange.
> It'd be cool to get one of those, but they're probably all gone to
> history. What brought this up? Some weird speech package called Enable
> that supported some of those which appears to be from the 80's.
> 
> 
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