Environmental monitoring story—early 80s microcomputer voice synthesis

[electronizer]

Getting my 1400XL working and listening to the voice output of the Votrax SC-01 speech synthesizer reminded me of a much earlier experience I had with that chip, involving a project my dad worked on in the early 1980s.

 

My dad was the administrator for the Department of Zoology at the University of Wisconsin. One of my earliest memories of using a computer was when he would take me to his office and let me play with his Apple II Plus computer. He didnt have any games on it, but he would load up the text to speech software for the Sweet Talker voice synthesizer card installed in the computer and I would have a great time typing things for the computer to say in its funny robotic voice. I especially got a kick out of typing in gibberish and listening to the computer try to pronounce something like 20 Rs in a row.

 

Why did my dad have an Apple II Plus with a speech synthesizer? It served a very useful purpose.

 

The professors and graduate students at the Department of Zoology often ran experiments involving samples that needed to be kept cold. If the refrigeration for one of the 23 cold rooms maintained by the department failed over the weekend, much hard work would be lost. This happened enough that my dad started trying to think of a solution. He bought an Apple II Plus computer and had twisted pair wiring installed from his office to temperature sensors in each of the cold rooms. Enlisting the help of a friend who had programming experience, he wrote a monitoring program to continuously display temperatures for the different cold rooms. When the temperature was out of spec, the screen line for that room would flash in inverse. Now, my dad could monitor all the cold rooms from his office, and over the weekend he could stop by and quickly check to make sure everything was ok. However, my dad started wondering if there was a way he could ensure everything was working without having to go in to the office. If only there was some way to check from home! We didnt yet have our Atari computer, so we couldnt dial in with a modem to download the data remotely. However, we did have a telephone. Enter the voice synthesizer.

 

With the Sweet Talker and an AppleCat modem, my dad and his friend programmed the computer to literally call home any time there was a problem. I remember picking up the phone and hearing the strange robotic voice announce, There is a freezer alarm in room one-ten. Now the weekend trips to the office to check cold room temperatures were a thing of the past.

 

Im guessing all the hardware required to build this setup cost thousands of dollars. I cant help thinking that if the 1400XL had made it to production, it would have been the perfect solution for this application, and at a much lower price. Maybe Ill see if I can get my 1400XL to make some of those robotic phone calls I remember so fondly.