At the 1939 World's Fair a machine called a Voder was shown . A girl stroked its keys and it emitted recognisable speech. No human vocal cords entered into the procedure at any point; the keys simply combined some electronically produced vibrations and passed these on to a loud-speaker." ("As We May Think" by Vannevar Bush, 1945. )

mr homer dudley, a research physicist at Bell Labs, built his "voder" 1939 for speech analysis and resynthesis.

the objective of early research on speech synthesis was to test whether the synthesizer design is capable of high-quality imitations of human voices.

but there are also some early mechanical examples: "Wolfgang von Kempelen introduced his "Acoustic-Mechanical Speech Machine", which was able to produce single sounds and some sound combinations (Klatt 1987, Schroeder 1993). In fact, Kempelen started his work before Kratzenstein, in 1769, and after over 20 years of research he also published a book in which he described his studies on human speech production and the experiments with his speaking machine.

i got interested to read more about charles simonyi, because he was babysitting the ural. (... The elder son of a Budapest professor of electrical engineering, Simonyi had first encountered a computer at the age of fifteen. This was a Soviet-made contraption called the "Ural 11"?? - was there an 11? or should it be II???) (source) seeing the create flag on chris side together with his history links of the day made me even more curious.

i found this interview at edge: intentional programming.

after reading it, i guess he was the right guy for billy boy, but i don´t think i would like to go for a drink with him.

just one quote: "We [at ms] were competing very effectively against Visicalc using a strategy that is very much like Java today; it was a platform independent, interpretive, bytecoded system, that enabled us at one point to run on 100 different platforms, (....)

well, i don´t know what to think about it. clearly there is some exaggeration and i don´t like his attitute overall. he got criticized here

later readings

i couldn't resist. i was already getting annoyed by going through all that papers (slauti has cleaned up now), still hearing adele goldberg, telling me: simply ask. so i did. i asked her following question: "what was it, alan kay was talking about 1970, that is quoted as: "I only hired people that got stars in their eyes when they heard about the notebook computer idea."?? did he talk about what later became known as dynabook or can i say he had the idea of the notetaker in mind?? (well, the formulation sucks, and i have to admit i got kind of obsessed with that point, but what the hack. the important thing is, i got an answer and another piece in my hand to tell the story right.)

her reply:

Hi Mariann, I am delighted to hear from you. (couldn't leave that out g)

Here is my answer to the question, to the best of my knowledge. First, Alan's vision since 1972 was expressed as "The Dynabook". He had a cardboard mockup of the physical idea...a flat device the size of a notebook binder in width and height, but very thin (like the thin technology size portables of today). There was no lid...more like a pad of paper whose surface was a touchable screen. It had wireless communications capability. He always stated that the problem was the software for the Dynabook--how to have good software that let people access and manipulate information, including the ability for these people to write programs. Hence the years of work in Smalltalk were a combination of exploring media, integration of media, and programming environment.

Hope this helps Adele

and who the hell is listening "matrix"? i thought people are always missing it?? adele wrote she already received a message as a result of my radio report. is this good or bad news? anyhow, she promised me a forward. let's wait.