ancient speech synthesizers

[Marcel Oats]

I know I'm slightly off topic perhaps, but I use to programme in 
basic on an Atari 400, then later the 800 XL (seriously!) making all 
these neat music programmes cos it had an amazing four voices that 
produced square waves!
Anyway, we got hold of Sam didn't we: "I am Sam, the software 
automatic mouth", was a TTS produced by Prodworks in an earlier form 
was it? You'd put the text or phonetics you'd want to have spoken 
into a string variable called sam$, then do an
x=usr(8192) for phonetics, or 8199 for text.
I had a lot of fun with that, and even tried writing a decent word 
processor with speech, but gave up.

Also, I had the hardware box that connected to the tape recorder 
port, called Pc Alien.  That was fun to play with, especially with 
its "random sentence generator."

Ah those were the days?
Marcel
At 11:50 PM 10/10/2006, you wrote:
>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
>
>--
>
>Kirk Reiser                             The Computer Braille Facility
>e-mail: kirk at braille.uwo.ca             University of Western Ontario
>phone: (519) 661-3061
>
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