@andrew Ah, another partial. Yeah, I know about cutting one's teeth on computers with limited accessibility at best. For me it was the Apple II family starting in the late 80s. I mean there was the Echo with Textalker, but I only had access to that at school, not on our Apple IIGS at home, and there was nothing for the GUI on the GS.

@matt I wondered what if anything was available for the IIGS. I don't know much about old Apple machines to be honest, they weren't that common in the UK. Yeah if I was totally blind I think my parents would have a real decision to make when migrating from the BBC. They were teachers so for them going to the Archimedes was a logical choice and they got heavy discounts. Most blind people went from the BBC to the PC because of lack of access on the Archimedes.

@jaybird110127 @mcourcel @fireborn @andrew @bryansmart Yeah, the whole executable was like 55 KB. Now you can't even do a self-contained hello world program in that space in some languages. *sigh*

@jaybird110127 @fireborn @andrew @bryansmart @matt True true. Who was behindASAP? Are they still around?

@mcourcel @fireborn @andrew @bryansmart @matt ASAP was written by Larry Skutchan. It was originally marketed and sold, bundled with a Doubletalk PC speech synthesizer, by Computersmith Enterprises, a company my parents ran out of our home. That lasted a year or so, then Larry took over marketing and sales, and sold it under his already existing MicroTalk brand.

@jaybird110127 @fireborn @andrew @bryansmart @matt Oh wow! That's pretty darn cool.

@mcourcel @fireborn @andrew @bryansmart @matt Incidentally, when Computersmith sold ASAP, it had a strong antipiracy measure. The copy of ASAP on the disk had a serial number embedded in it, and the bundled Doubletalk PC card also had a serial number. In order for ASAP to run, the two serial numbers had to match. If you downloaded an update from the MicroTalk BBS, you used a Brand program that shipped with your copy of ASAP to brand your serial number into the new ASAP program you just downloaded. Of course when MicroTalk took over, I'm sure Larry knew he would have to support other speech synthesizers, so that strong antipiracy system had to go. In fact, that's when an unregistered/unbranded ASAP started acting as a demo version.

@jaybird110127 @fireborn @andrew @bryansmart @matt Does anybody have a recording of the message that it played when it wanted to annoy you?

@mcourcel @fireborn @andrew @bryansmart @matt Amazingly, I actually fell victim to the antipiracy measure one morning. I woke up, went upstairs, turned on the computer, and ASAP wouldn't work. It just said, as I recall, "zero zero two seven zero zero zero six." I called my dad upstairs to show him what was going on. It turns out he was playing around and accidentally had the wrong copy of ASAP installed on our system. Remember, he was the one making ASAP disks and burning the ROM chips for the bundled Doubletalk cards for customers at the time. As you've probably figured out by now, our Doubletalk had a serial number of 6 (which I already knew) and for some reason the copy of ASAP that was running was expecting 27.

@jaybird110127 @mcourcel @fireborn @andrew @bryansmart @matt Was there a utility for burning those ROMs, or did you actually have to put a chip into an EPROM burner?
I used to have one of those.

@mcourcel @fireborn @andrew @bryansmart @matt Dad had a burner, and a program on the PC to burn the chips. I never used it, so have no idea how it worked. As far as I know, no copy of that directory still exists anywhere, which is sad as it might contain useful ROM code.

@jaybird110127 @mcourcel @fireborn @bryansmart @matt I did holiday work at Dolphin Systems back in the late 90's. They had some interesting programs to burn the ROMs for their synths as well as write master disks. I had always thought that special hardware was required to write those disks but actually they did it using standard disk drives. They were strictly copy protected however.

@andrew @jaybird110127 @mcourcel @fireborn @bryansmart @matt such a shame they have abandoned all their text-to-speech and Braille work. Dolphin were solid for decades in both areas.

@cachondo @jaybird110127 @mcourcel @fireborn @bryansmart @matt Oh really have they actually abandoned SuperNova now then?

@andrew @jaybird110127 @mcourcel @fireborn @bryansmart @matt no, they still sell it, but not with any of their own speech engine or anything.

@cachondo @jaybird110127 @mcourcel @fireborn @bryansmart @matt Yeah they're still working on it aren't they? I think they know though that it's not really the tool that most blind people use anymore.