This warms my tech heart. I can’t imagine a university computer lab doing this in 1974. A couple of System Analyst that I worked with between 1987-1995 got their start as operators in the Univ Arkansas data processing center in the late 70’s. The student lab was just a couple tables in the back corner of the operations center. The students could keypunch their programs and then get the operator to submit them for compiling. The cards had to be read through the card reader and the job submitted.
To think Michigan state was doing computer speech synthesis in 1974 is just incredible. Glad they got this on video.
Just imagine, this was 6 years before the computer tech in War Games which featured a real IMSAI 8080 computer.
Check out the acoustic modem this guy uses ordering a pizza. It’s probably 300 baud. I had a 1200 baud acoustic modem in 1985.
Fascinating video. That’s not a modem, though. It’s an acoustic coupler. It could be used with a modem, but in this case it was to feed the sound from the computer into the mouthpiece and the sound from the earpiece into the speaker.
Didn’t think about that. I didn’t do much with Artificial Language when I was a student. But it makes sense that they needed a way to get the computer sound into the telephone.
The programming itself wasn’t too complicated. All yes/no questions with simple If then Else logic. The artifical speech is what would have been tricky in 1974.
Heck my University didn’t have Timesharing accounts until at least 1979. Before that, everything was batch submitted by the operators. I think some programs could request input from the operators console, but the shop standard was punched cards for any data input.
There are degrees of “artificial speech.” Direct modulation of a tone generator is a very primitive approach, and goes back to the speaking automatons of the 1700s. Having a computer do the modulation is just a parlor trick. We were doing elaborate tunesmithing and speech generation using an HP engineering computer in 1975… in high school.
When the programming is sophisticated enough to allow word or syllable input that are then interpreted into spoken phonemes, you’ve crossed the line into genuine artificial speech.
<slaps wrist> Good sir, in the future please use proper board etiquette and employ the colloquial “hookers and blow” in instances such as this. Thank you.
