[Ham-Computers] Texas Instruments And Their TE#2 Circa 1981

[Duane Fischer, W8DBF]

Hey Aaron, NN6O (and all)

Way back in last century, in the year 1981, Texas Instruments Inc. released 
TTS for the first time on what was their ROM plug in module designed for 
their home computer the TI 99/4.

TTS, for those who are unfamiliar with said term, stands for Text To Speech. 
This is a software program that uses the 44 sounds that comprise the English 
language to enable a synthetic speech synthesizer to be able to say any 
word, number, punctuation mark etc. it encounters when rading a text string 
in the software program, of displayed on the CRT when the user types text 
into a program in response to an input command. Such as: "Please Enter Your 
Name".

Previously, a computer could only say words, or a string of words, 
pre-programmed into the computer. It could not 'read' the screen to anyone 
or speak any word or phrase that the programmers had not previously 
instructed the computer how to say it. These words or phrases used what 
sounded to me like an actual human voice, both male and female, to speak the 
pre-programmed word or phrase. This was, and is, very important for learning 
and was used at the outset to make the powerful TI learning programs for 
elementary school children even more effective and efficient.

  . TTS meant that any speakable word or number or character could now be 
spoken "WITHOUT" any prior programming! Hence, for the blind and print 
handicapped, the possibility of a text screen reading program became 
possible.

It was first released as part of the Terminal Emulator #2 ROM module. I 
recall the original article that was written by a TI inhouse PR person, "The 
Chip Heard Around The World".

How do I figure into this? Let's just say for now, that I have the actual 
original 5.25 inch 90K diskette that contains TTS in assembler code in the 
bottom right hand drawer of my den/office desk. Incredibly, the entire 
program that makes all that speaks artifically, only used 38K of RAM!

I wrote an educational program in 1984 for my daughter to use as part of her 
sixth grade Science Fair project. Participation for sixth-eighth grade 
students was mandatory! I incorporated the entire TTS code, a program that 
taught students the United States Presidents prior to 1900 and after 1900, 
the music for "God Bless America" using the TI 16 bit cpu + three voice 
sound chip, animated graphics using "sprites" and more, all on a 90K 
diskette with 40K of the disk empty! Nowadays such a program would require 
at least 50 Meg of RAM! Now what does that tell you about the skill of the 
programmer being constantly reduced and the size of the resulting software 
program increasing exponentially. Hence today's programmers type in text and 
the computer program converts it into the computer language. More steps, 
each step takes CPU time, the conversion of text into code requires more 
internal storage, hence larger hard drives, more temporary RAM storage, 
hence RAM drives, etc. Now we have faster computer chips to compensate for 
the more work the computer must do that I programmed in at the outset. The 
same is true for the larger HD and the huge amounts of RAM used. What I did 
using an Intell 4.77 MHZ processor and 48K of internal RAM with a 90K and 
eventually a 10 Meg HD, ran as fast in 1984 as a 3+ GHZ processor does 
today!

All of that to say this: Aaron, you used a TI 99/4 or 99/4A. Did you have 
the expansion system add on? Did you ever use the TTS portion on the TE2 ROM 
plug in module? Did TI invent the modular ROM plug in concept? Why did TI 
run their 16 bit CPU a decade before anyone else did?

Duane W8DBF