I remember playing around with the early Votrax. What I remember is a
little embarrassing. WE used to try to make the Votrax cuss. No matter
what you typed, it wouldn't say a cuss word. Sounds dumb now but when
I was in my teens it was fascinating to me that we couldn't get that
synth to cuss.
On Jun 6, 2009, at 4:22 PM, Gary W. Kelly wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> Some of us were around even before the Echo and Cricket. My first
> Apple was an Apple II-I--from 1977, and I was already out of undergrad
> school and working before Apple began.
>
> Anyone remember the Vocoder, or early Votrax?
>
> Yes, I do remember Mountain Hardware, and owned one of their
> products. The card was a graphics card that handled sprites, did
> large print, and did have a limited speech capability. That came out
> in the 1980's after we had floppy drives, and were no longer loading
> from a cassette tape! Back in those days, one wrote all programs of a
> special nature oneself--often in Apple Basic, which came out in the
> late 70's. The first basic was an Integer Basic, which is why the II-I
> was called a 2-I. It had no floating point basic. Bill Gates wrote
> the basic for Apple, and Apple had the good sense to buy it from him
> outright. The old machines came with 48K of RAM! We did a lot with
> them.
>
> It was very exciting to get fancy new hardware with 1980--the Apple II
> Plus, had 64K, floppy drives!--and even a modem that was 300 baud, as
> opposed to the older ones of 110. Dennis Hayes was a young professor
> at Georgia Tech then, and just getting started.
>
> Visicalc was written for the Apple in the early 1980's, and started
> the real revolution to the PC. I remember being excited to get a
> chip for my old Apple that let me have upper and lower case, so I
> could better do word processing with it--with a product called Tedit,
> and later Apple Writer [], called Apple Writer 2.
>
> My first printer was an old ASR-33 teletype, that only wrote in
> uppercase. It was so loud, that we either left the room when
> printing, or put the thing out in the hall to print. I put wheels on
> it, to wheel it outside of the door!
>
> I was highly productive in those days. While many of my colleagues
> were laborious writing out their papers and proposals in longhand,
> Remember that art?--[grin]--I could write my papers on the Apple, edit
> them, and print the rough draft on that old ASR-33! I could give a
> ready draft to my secretary, so it could be typed into a final draft--
> ready to go. I was more productive than my peers.
>
> It was an exciting time. Advances came along all the time--and major
> ones. There were a number of other Apple products that flopped, and
> the Apple was the cash cow for Apple. The Lisa, the Apple 3, came and
> went before Jobs got the Mac worked out.
>
> The difference between then and now was that leaps in computer tech
> came as more revolutionary than evolutionary. The mouse arrived then,
> and it changed the world.
>
> There was a portable Apple II called the IIc. The Apple II-E
> followed the II plus, and was the one most people know. The IIgs came
> in 1986--I still have mine. It has an old Slotbuster, which was made
> by Randy Carlstrum, of RC Systems--the precursor to the LiteTalk and
> DoubleTalk you know.
>
> I have 2 LiteTalks, and a DoubleTalk, too. I liked the Slotbuster, as
> it ran well with AppleWorks, which I used to write my thesis in grad
> school. By then, Macs were dominating the
> scene, as the Apple II Forever died in 1988, while Jobs left to form
> Next Computer.
>
> By then a younger Larry Schutchan wrote Proterm, and his first
> software for the Apple II. He quickly moved off to the PC, and the
> excellent work on ASAP.--No, he is still around--at A{PH, and is the
> creator of things you know, like Bookport--now extinct, and the
> Braille Plus, which many of you do know.
>
> AppleWorks was an amazing creation, in that it was one of the first
> Suites of software. It had a third party developer--there were many
> then working on Apple Products, called Beagle Brothers. Their
> enhancements put AppleWorks at the top of what one might do then.
>
> Back before the IIgs, there were music cards--one of the more notable
> was the ALF music card, which had an exciting sound for that time.
> The IIgs supplanted ALF.
>
> I did use an early edition of Outspoken for the Mac--the OS then on
> the Mac LC was 4.5, as I recall. It was upgradable to 7.5, and I
> believe that is what is still on it. I found that old Outspoken very
> difficult to use, and admit I chose the easier route of Word Perfect
> 5.1 on a PC with ASAP.
>
> The old LC is still in a box, and last I knew, it still runs. I did
> have my IIgs up this past year pulling off some old files of the 64mb
> HD I added to it, when I added the zipchip of 8 mhz. It took PC's
> until the 400 mhz processors to be as fast as an Apple II with my
> zipchip.
>
> AppleWorks had a PC reincarnation in DOS days--called SuperWorks, it
> was an analog of AppleWorks on a PC. It never worked as well with
> speech.
>
> One has to wonder how the world would be different if the Waz had
> pushed for the 32-bit 6502, and a IIgs that carried on the Apple II
> tradition. The open architecture of that day helped to make it an
> exciting era. It might make for a great SF novel of an alternate
> reality.
>
>
> >
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"MacVisionaries" group.
To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
