Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!uwm.edu!spool.mu.edu!uunet!mcsun!cernvax!chx400!bernina!bernina!neeri From: neeri@iis.ethz.ch (Matthias Ulrich Neeracher) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.system Subject: Re: Macintalk Message-ID: Date: 24 May 91 11:04:00 GMT References: <1991May24.071611.4646@hawk.cs.ukans.edu> Sender: news@bernina.ethz.ch (USENET News System) Organization: Integrated Systems Laboratory, ETH, Zurich Lines: 23 In-Reply-To: chai@hawk.cs.ukans.edu's message of 24 May 91 07:16:11 GMT Nntp-Posting-Host: etzj-gw In article <1991May24.071611.4646@hawk.cs.ukans.edu> chai@hawk.cs.ukans.edu (Ian Chai) writes: >Donald Peterson's search for a Mac program that reads text out loud >reminded me that this facility came out with the mac way back in '84 >or so, in the form of Macintalk, but that in recent years, Macintalk >seems to have been abandoned by Apple. The story as I heard it is that Apple only has the *binary* for MacInTalk, but absolutely no source code. All changes have to be made as binary patches. And MacInTalk is an *old* program. The first version even accessed hardware addresses directly. >Why??????? Apple coulda boasted that Mac was the only computer that >*came* with built-in speech synthesis... but no, they let it fall by >the wayside. I thought a complete rewrite was under way for some time. Matthias ----- Matthias Neeracher neeri@iis.ethz.ch "These days, though, you have to be pretty technical before you can even aspire to crudeness." -- William Gibson, _Johnny Mnemonic_