ISA Expansion Box

From: pmulry <paulm064_at_icqmail.com>
Date: Thu Apr 24 21:33:01 2003

ok, i took a tangent (my mind works that way) :-(
all roads lead to rome :-/
all hamburgers are not macdonalds :-|
all opsys's are not microsoft :-)

----- Original Message -----
From: "Frank McConnell" <fmc_at_reanimators.org>
To: <cctalk_at_classiccmp.org>
Sent: Friday, April 25, 2003 10:49 AM
Subject: Re: ISA Expansion Box


> Ethan Dicks <erd_6502_at_yahoo.com> wrote:
> > They are a box with a passive ISA back plane and a pair of ISA cards
> > that are connected with a single round cable about as big around as
> > your thumb. The box itself is styled like an XT (down to the sloping
> > front).
>
> The original poster was describing an intended use for these to enable
> use of a speech-synthesis card on what I'm guessing is a more modern
> PC with a sound card, as a backup for when the sound card or its
> drivers fail. I guess what I'm wondering is, how is this supposed to
> work with shiny new PCs that have no ISA slots, and is that what the
> poster is really after? Probably completely off topic though.
>
> As long as I'm off the rails, some other ramblings:
>
> A blind former ex-cow-orker used to use Artic speech synthesizers to
> work her computers. I remember her having both an ISA card and an
> external box about the size of a paperback book (maybe a bit thinner
> and longer) which attached to the PC via a serial port, and later
> another smaller Artic external box (about half the size of the older
> one). These were something of a nuisance due to copy protection -- it
> wasn't enough to require the speech synthesizer hardware, the Artic
> software was keyed to the specific speech synthesizer.
>
> Later (I'm thinking 1997 or 1998) she switched to using a software
> package called JAWS from Henter-Joyce. This could either use the
> Artic synthesizer or the Windows audio drivers (she was running NT 4.0
> on her notebook PC). She liked the voice of the Artic box (because
> she'd been using it for years and had got used to it), but rapidly got
> used to the software speech-synthesizer code because it meant one or
> two less things to have to carry around.
>
> JAWS was also copy protected, with a key diskette that allowed some
> small number of installations to hard disks -- you could also
> de-install and increment the counter on the key disk in order to move
> the installation, but of course if the hard disk got whacked then you
> might not have the opportunity to do this.
>
> -Frank McConnell
Received on Thu Apr 24 2003 - 21:33:01 BST