Altair32 Emulator "Easter Egg" idea

[Vintage Computer Festival]

On Fri, 4 Mar 2005, Pete Turnbull wrote:

> Sounds (sorry) like a good idea.  The inspiration for HAL singing
> "Daisy" when he was lobotomised by Dave Bowman in "2001" was that Bell
> Labs had demonstrated an IBM 7094 "singing" "Daisy" in 1961.  Bell Labs

http://vortex.com/rmf/daisy.ram

(Requires RealPlayer)

> were doing research into vocal-tract modelling; John Kelly had wired a
> speaker to one of the output bits and he and Carol Lochbaum[1]
> programmed the vocal, with Max Mathews, who was pioneering digital
> music, did the accompaniment.  The whole thing was programmed onto
> magtape, read back once complete and "played" through the speaker.  The
> recording they made was also once available on an album called "Music
> from Mathematics".

Never heard of that one!  But it's also available on a 45 called "Computer
Speech: He Saw the Cat" produced by Bell Telephone Laboratories.  Copies
of that are not terribly uncommon.  I have the album and John Lawson
(thanks!) transcribed a copy to CD for me.

> I'm sure there used to be an article on the web about it, though I
> can't seem to find it right now, though I have found references to some
> of the Bell Labs reports and tapes:
> http://www.mindspring.com/~ssshp/ssshp_cd/ss_btl1.htm (about 2/3 down).
>  What I can find, though, is a digitised copy of the recording they
> made, which I downloaded, so I've put it on my website for you:
>
>     http://www.dunnington.u-net.com/public/daisy.aifc

Always good to have mirrors :)  The link above has been there for years.

> I also have an MP3 version, which isn't much inferior (and much
> smaller!):
>
>     http://www.dunnington.u-net.com/public/daisy.mp3

Ooh, an MP3 version :)

-- 

Sellam Ismail                                        Vintage Computer Festival
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International Man of Intrigue and Danger                http://www.vintage.org

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