[ale] geezer notice with meeting idea

[Larry Johnson]

If you wanted to go really retro my late wife was blind, and I
probably have her 1985 vintage speech synthesizer stored somewhere in
my back room.  I believe the brand was something like "Vox Talk", and
accepted a straight ASCII stream across a serial port (which could be
incomprehensible) but had an instruction set for more understandable
and human paced voice.

Larry

On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 1:03 PM, Jim Kinney <jim.kinney at gmail.com> wrote:
> How true! That older hardware is more robust than some of this newer stuff.
>
> Hmm. A build-it demo to create a solid system for the blind would make a
> good group project. And we likely have enough older hardware around that
> would make a decent system or two. I know I have a pair of working
> P4/celeron level mobos with ram and sound. Not fast enough to run hulu in
> full screen mode but solid web browsers.
>
> On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 12:35 PM, John G. Heim <jheim at math.wisc.edu> wrote:
>>
>> You know, if you build that thing, it might have a practical use as a
>> computer for a blind person. Not that anyone would actually want it given
>> that in most communities you can pick up a P4 for nothing from someone who
>> doesn't want to pay the disposal fee.
>>
>> Still, I use my original pentium laptop with54 Mb of RAM practically every
>> day. You can install linux with speech, mail, web browser, text editor,
>> etc
>> in less than 512 Mb.
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Jim Kinney" <jim.kinney at gmail.com>
>> To: "Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts - Yes! We run Linux!" <ale at ale.org>
>> Sent: Thursday, April 29, 2010 9:20 AM
>> Subject: [ale] geezer notice with meeting idea
>>
>>
>> > Having participated in the "strut your geek cred stuff by showing off
>> > the
>> > dusty crap you used, or worse, still have" discussion, it occurred to me
>> > why
>> > the typical age of attendance at ALE meetings is rarely including those
>> > who
>> > cut their computer teeth on Win98.
>> >
>> > We are a bunch of crusty ol' farts and some of us have truly horrible
>> > pack-rat tendencies!
>> >
>> > Maybe we should have a meeting that is a show-n-tell session of old gear
>> > that we can still _make_work_. Antiquated technologies demonstration.
>> > Maybe
>> > even some ancient Linux on floppy installs that can be done onto that
>> > old
>> > 386 you know you still have.
>> >
>> > I'm sure Aaron has an amiga (or twelve) he could demo. :-)
>> >
>> > Hmm. What is the oldest rig we can scrounge, slap Linux on it and add as
>> > many externals as possible and make it all work. Dual monitor i386SX
>> > with
>> > ata & scsi and floppy with network card, modem, scanner, ham rig,
>> > printer,
>> > sound card, etc...
>> >
>> > --
>> > --
>> > James P. Kinney III
>> > Actively in pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness
>> > Doing pretty well on all 3 pursuits
>> >
>>
>>
>>
>> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>
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>> >
>>
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>
>
>
> --
> --
> James P. Kinney III
> Actively in pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness
> Doing pretty well on all 3 pursuits
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
>
>