17 Oct
2007
17 Oct
'07
3:06 p.m.
> > Well, at least it's better than using
solenoids and photocells (which
> > would have permitted a wider choice of calculators)
> That was saved for I/O devices. :)
On Wed, 17 Oct 2007, Ethan Dicks wrote:
Yeah.... my mother had a Selectric typewriter back
when we got our
first computer (32K PET). She was, at first, interested in the
solenoid-based typewriter adapter, but I think it turned out to be too
expensive for her. I didn't get a printer on a computer until many
years later, and that was dot matrix.
Too bad, those were FUN!
I never came up with any other way to transfer my manuscript into my
publisher's Merganthaler typesetter.
One of my TRS model 3's had a keyboard that wasn't working well. But, if
I hit a key enough times it would start to work. Put the box of solenoids
on top of the keyboard and dumped a bunch of files, and the keyboard
eventually worked OK.
Besides calculators, I remember an article in Byte to
adapt a TI
Speak-n-Spell to a computer. Given that the toys weren't cheap, I
don't know how much it would have saved over an SC-02 Votrax chip, but
certainly the Speak-n-Spell hack was interesting.
Percom peddled a Speak-n-spell interface.
Speak-n-spell was fairly easy to find for $50; a fully assembled Votrax
device was around $300.
To quote Debee Norling, "A Votrax sounds like a Martian in a tin can".
Speak-n-spell was beautifully clear, but with a finite vocabulary,