ancient speech synthesizers

[W. Nick Dotson]

Well, the Accent uses the same Artic, at one point called "SSI"" 263 speech chip, which Artic used on the 200, 215, series and later in their Transport 
TransType and Ergo/Braille Desk products.  By the way, that same Artic 263 chip is in the Braille'n Speak and other Blazie products.  The 263 chip was a 
lineal  descendant of the Votrax line of synthesizers, because most of the Artic crew left Votrax (Federal Screw Works) as a team.  Blazie and NFB didn't 
want to buy the chip when rights of ownership reverted back to Artic, after SSI had sold enough of the chips, which was part of the deal for manufacture of 
the Artic designed unit.  Artic really made it sing with their speech algorithms "vest" and "advest" which were part of their screen reading packages, 
although they could've and should've been incorporated into ROM.  Artic's whole problem was that Tim Gargliano (spelling?) their programmer was paranoid 
and burned out because people would buy their boards and swipe their Sonix code, in the days before they started serializing their boards with software.  
Tim wanted the whole ball of wax and didn't want anyone like Ron Claton Hutchinson (remember him) selling his screen reader and using any of the Artic 
Team's work.  Even back then, we had that school of thought, "It's only good if a blind man wrote the code" silliness, and Artic had the courage to say 
"nuts!".  Those phonemic synthesizers were wonderful in a lot of ways today's neophytes just don't have a clue about...

Nick

On Mon, 9 Oct 2006 20:35:14 -0700, Tyler Spivey wrote:

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 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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