My experience does include some exposure to several of the projects. The first was at Mark Williams Company (MWC), where the first version of the Unix-like operating system Coherent was first done on a PDP-11/45. The first thing to be done was to build a C compiler from scratch and was accomplished by one of the 10x programmers that I knew, David G. Conroy (DGC). For a time, Intel used the MWC 8086 compiler repackaged as their own. The C compiler was also sold for MS-DOS and some really odd machines. One of those was for Rediffusion who wanted to a compiler for their bespoke architecture. It was simple enough that I wrote an emulator for the language as a basis to test the compiler.
Another computer mentioned was the Rainbow. DGC ported the compiler there, and in the process, wrote MicroEMACS, which is now known as MG on Linux and Unix. (Apparently this is the editor that Linus uses.)
We also had a VAX (I think it was a 730, very low-powered) to port the 8086 compiler to be hosted on VMS.
After MWC, DGC went to DEC and worked on DecTalk, an early text-to-speech device. The story goes that one member of the team, whose voice was used as the basis for the sounds, lost his voice. Thus his voice lived on only through this device.
When I was at Sycor in the late 70s, our computer was a PDP-10 (or Dec-10) running Tops 10. We wrote a cross compiler for 8085 in Bliss-36. (The assembly language for the PDP-10 was probably the most attractive I have come across.)
When I was at Datalogics (1990-1992), who trained probably. half the world in SGML, and provided software for database publishing, legal loose leaf publishing (ask me about footnotes) and whose software was printing a substantial fraction of the red herring prospectuses at the time. They used a VAX running VMS. I had a Dec Station running some flavor of Unix. This was my first use of Emacs. As opposed to MicroEMACS.
Well...a DECtalk also weighs about 15 lbs and is packed with components. So it was probably a weight/quality tradeoff considering it needed to be mounted on a wheelchair.
I understand Hawkings last version use a Raspberry PI, with the original voice.
I was a kid when I saw one, in Brazil, at a computer convention. It was, probably "Feira Internacional de Informática" in Brazil, in the early 1980s. The DEC team was incredibly friendly, even to two kids (I went there with a cousin) who would, maybe, be their customers, 20 years later.
Grew up on a farm. Dealt with cows, horses, chickens. Chickens are by far the worst. Maybe bats would be worse. Happy to leave that as an exercise for someone else’s imagination
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