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Our Turn for the Blues

Condolences to Theresa.

I will miss Walt's fine delta blues guitar, and the astonishing dynamic range of his voice.

And I will miss Walter's love of all things tech-y.
We nerded around together a lot, since '85.
I think he called Quantum one day, and Cliff handed the call to me.
We had fun.
I'd help him install some new adaptive aid, and zoom .. he was off .. and it was my turn to learn.


One day we set up a new scanner.


If we got it tuned right, Walt could put in a printed page, and it would process the print into a text file inside the computer. The process was called OCR, or Scan-to-Text. 
People usually used OCR to avoid re-typing the copy. But Walt wanted to run the OCR'd text right thru all the way into his TTS (TExt-to-Speech) synthesizer - sort of a Page -to- Text -to- Speech.
Walt had long used his fabulous vintage (rs232) DEC-Talk, and newer TTS tools, so that part was ripe & ready.


However, configuring and tuning the scanner to get just the right amount of detail, for the OCR to be accurate .. proved .. daunting.


Any alphabet characters the OCR could not resolve were replaced with "the AT sign" @
So an avera@e line lo@ked like thi@ .. lots of ATs.
We did try our best, but due to vagaries of Caere Corp's OCR processor (of the day), we weren't going to achieve 100% OCR accuracy .. that year, no matter how nerdy we went.

A week or so along, I came by, and Walt let out a laugh, and wiggled around in his chair like a kid, and said: "Listen to this".
He queued one of our not-so-good text files (with lots of AT-signs), and started tweaking the timbre of the Speech Engine to sound high and tinny. Then he ran the text thru the Text-to-Speech.
The classic, old tech computer voice came to life, and said:
"At AT AtAT ATatAtAtATat At At"
We laughed like children, and tried different speech settings.
"At at ATatAT .."
And we laughed some more.
Soooo nerdy.

Years later comes 1995's movie "Mars Attacks".
I do believe the writers of that movie must have gone through the same flaky-OCR ordeals as Walt and I.
Because, when we finally hear the bulbous-head movie Martians speak, they sound like:
"At at aAT AT atatat" !!!

Love & Peace, Brother
Will CQ on the other side

Posted by John Donovan
Thursday March 8, 2018 at 4:18 pm
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