ancient speech synthesizers

[Steve Holmes]

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It also goes to show you that greed was around good andd strong even
back then too.  We would be so much better off if hardware manufacturers
would open their specs up to all and let whoever right software for
them.  After all, they are selling the hardware for a price.  Like I
always say, the more people that can write stuff like drivers and
software for a device, the more units that can be sold.  See, even Apple
is fucking us over again.  They redesigned the ipod now so Rockbox won't
work on the new ipods anymore.

On Tue, Oct 10, 2006 at 08:26:35AM -0500, W. Nick Dotson wrote:
> 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

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