ancient speech synthesizers

[Kirk Reiser]

Wow Chuck, you were wealthy!  My first voice synth was produced for
the Radio Shack model one computer in '78 or '9 I think.  I may
actually still have that old thing laying around somewhere but I'm not
sure.  A stock broker up in New York somewhere made the first screen
review software for it.  His name was Peter something but I don't
remember anymore about him than that.

Before that model one I used the old Commodore Pet with the chicklet
keyboard.  I wrote a simple routine to read the screen memory and ship
it out the IEEE-488 port to drive a speaker as an oscillator to
produce Morse code.  I used that computer to do my Physics fields
assignment and ended up selling the program to the physics department
as well.  That system is not a memory which brings back fond
recollections.  The worst voice synth is a hundred times faster than
Morse.  It worked however.  I even ran some experiments at the time
hooking up solenoids eight to be specific to the IEEE-488 output bus
to try to use that for data.  Way to fast and gave up before to long
because I could translate Morse faster than I could convert binary.

In those days you loaded programs and data off cassette tape so you'd
  start a program loading and go poor a cup of coffee and get a
  snack.  It was faster than typing them however with my KIM-1.

  Kirk

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Kirk Reiser				The Computer Braille Facility
e-mail: kirk at braille.uwo.ca		University of Western Ontario
phone: (519) 661-3061