[NFBCS] Blast from the past

[Doug Lee]

This message is purely anecdotal and contains the following small tales:
* My first synthetic speech misunderstandings.
* The Flipper misunderstanding that rattled an office.
* My ambitions and attempts in the Apple days.

My first synthetic speech misunderstanding:

I typed "catalog" to get a disk listing. TexTalker said, "A002 HELLO." I seem to recall going, "A C O C What??"

Shortly after that, I ran the program called "SEC DEMO" from the TexTalker disk. Part of this program
allowed one to type phrases, press Enter, and hear them spoken. This part was introduced by the synth
saying, "Now type in what you want me to say or type 'end' to end this demo." I did not understand the
prompt correctly, partly because it said "demo" like "demote" without the t sound at the end. So my little
15-year-old self tried to end the program by typing, "list hello." This got taped because I was recording
the actual demo; but sadly the tape did not survive this long.

The Flipper misunderstanding that rattled an office:

In 1990 while I was teaching a blind woman to use Flipper and the Audapter synth, a woman whom I should
mention was losing her sight and had never used a speech synth to date, the Audapter powered up and made its
typical initial announcement:

Audapter speech system.
Voice menu.

At, "voice menu," the woman exclaimed loudly, "We smell you?!" This yelp of astonishment brought several
neighboring roomfulls of office staff sailing in to find out what the heck was going on.

My ambitions and attempts in the Apple days:

My first big move was to send the entire Monitor disassembly listing of textalker.blind through a friend's
Cranmer modified Perkins brailler. That used roughly 60 sheets of paper and quite a chunk of time. I then
successfully rewrote the start of that program to shrink a repetitive block of slot-scanning code into a
loop, which made enough room for me to add the feature of letting the review command, Ctrl+L, freeze the
reading of a long text file, such as in the "read textfile" program, let me read the screen, then exit
review mode and have the reading pick up where it left off. There was one bug I never fixed though: Exactly
one character was always lost between entry and exit of review mode.

When a friend acquired the Thunderclock Plus card, my first exposure to asynchronous events, I became quite
excited by several ideas of what could be done with such a resource. By now I don't remember most of those,
but I believe one was the idea of having TexTalker either fix its own loss of control on Reset or watch for
user requests asynchronously. I read some code that used the card and spoke some plans into a tape that I
braille-labeled "tb-tcp/lr," which stood for "textalker.blind ThunderClock Plus and line review," if I
remember right. That tape vanished on a friend's visit years later along with a few others, including my
recordings of the two AT&T synths I mentioned in a previous message in this thread.

My most ambitious project though was what I called BRLHGR, an Assembly program to copy a high-resolution
Apple graphics screen to a braille printer. I chose a ratio of 3x3 pixels to one braille dot, and I decided
that any single pixel that was drawn in the non-background color would cause the corresponding braille dot
to appear. I wrote this program by dictating it onto tapes while on family trips and such, then typing it
into an actual assembler on a friend's Apple; I never had an Apple of my own. I never got it debugged and
running though, and I suspect the results would have severely disappointed me in quality. I was probably 16
when all that happened.

On Mon, Feb 26, 2024 at 11:02:40AM -0800, Brian Buhrow wrote:
	hello.  Doug mentioned Flipper in his historical journey.  I, too started with Apple II
and Street Electronics Texttalker.  I still have the original Apple II reference manual in
braille, which came complete with tactile diagrams of memory maps and the complete 6502
assembly instruction set, listed by pneumonic.  I read the thing from cover to cover. (many
covers for those who remember multi-volume braille books.)

	However, it was Flipper that inspired me to write this message.  Of all the DOS based
screen readers I used over the years, Flipper was the easiest to use, ran the fastest, and
provided the most information in the most efficient fashion!  How good was it, you might ask?
For me, it was so good, that I used it well into the 2000's, retiring it finally in 2007.
Well, partially.  I now use Mike Gorse's Yasr as my daily screen reader.  Howevr, to make it
more compatible with my muscle memory, I rewrote all of the keymaps to match the old Flipper
commands, as well as rewriting some of the punctuation nomenclature to match what Flipper used
to say.  So, for some of us, Flipper is still alive and well!

-thanks
-Brian

-- 
Doug Lee                 dgl at dlee.org                http://www.dlee.org
"While they were saying among themselves it cannot be done, it was
done." --Helen Keller