[GreenKeys] [External] Teletype Ink Jet printer

[Jones, Douglas W]

From: Harold Hallikainen via GreenKeys [greenkeys at mailman.qth.net] -- Thursday, March 16, 2023 9:33 PM

> ... I thought at the time that Bell Labs was interested
> in it as a way to convert speech to a set of instructions down the wire,

Yup.  Our little LAN was in the Accoustics Research Department (Department 1227).  We had people doing speech recognition (what are they saying, regardless of who is saying it), speaker recognition (who is saying it, regardless of what they say), sound compression, and speech synthesys.

The guy who took my job after I moved on to other things was my former roommate, Jim Johnston, who ended up taking a permanent job at Bell Labs and ended up co-inventing MP2, the predecessor of MP3.

> And, this is the earliest mention of a mouse that I've seen. 

The folks in Department 1227 heard about the famous super demonstration at SRI and immediately made their own mouse.  It was an aluminum brick with a pair of rotary shaft encoders inside, perpendicular, with steel wheels perpendicular to each other that stuck out the bottom.  There was a push button on the end.   It looked very home made, but it worked.  I tried writing a little program to move a cursor on the display screen in response to mouse movement.  Never got it working, but note, we had no operating system (aside from what I wrote for them), so most user programs did low level I/O directly to hardware.

> of it at the Xerox PARC, but I guess this was around the same time.

PARC picked up the idea from SRI also.  Their automated office of the future project built much more compact workstations that were fully functional a few years after our cobbled-together machines at Bell Labs.

        Doug