[NFBCS] Blast from the past

[Brian Buhrow]

	hello on the educational front with regard to the Apple IIe, My mom bought the 64K high
resolution add-on card for the IIe.  Because Texttalker ran in this tiny segment of memory
above the graphics display memory, it was always getting clobbered off the  main memory map by
a plethora of programs that also wanted that space.  I decided if I could rewrite the
Texttalker program so that it could run out of the bank-switched memory on the high res
graphics card, I might be able to actually get speech to work with programs that normally used
Texttalker's memory locations.  While I got Texttalker to run out of that bank-switched memory,
I found the bank switching was so slow as to make  Texttalker virtually unusable.  So, when I
began running into issues with interrupt vectors jumping off into the wrong bank of memory,
because it wasn't switched in, I didn't pursue it.


	However, it was a good lesson for a followup project which was to make Rased Dot
Computing's Braille Edit Express (BEX) run on my high school's Apple IIgs.  There were two
issues to be solved there: 1.  A timing issue that prevented speech from working on the IIgs
because it ran too fast, and, 2.  reorganizing the program loading process so it would load
off of the new 3.5 inch diskettes the IIgs used.  This project was a success and my high school
used that hacked copy of BEX for some years after I graduated.

	I always wanted to tell David Holliday about this hack, because I was quite proud of it,
but somehow I never felt he would appreciate the effort; he was very proprietary of his
software.  Now, sadly, it's too late to share this childhood triumph with him.

-Brian