[DECtalk] DECtalk versions (was Weather dectalk)
Jayson Smith
ratguy at insightbb.com
Mon Jul 11 22:44:03 EDT 2011
Hi,
Ed, Snoopi, Blake, or Corine, please correct me if anything I say in this
message is wrong.
As far as I know, Fonix owns the rights to all versions of DECtalk ever
produced, all the way back to the very first copy ever compiled, or at least
the oldest copy that still exists anywhere anyway. Nothing that has DECtalk
code in it is public domain, as the DECtalk code is not public domain.
As far as versions go, it's anybody's guess what happened to the 4.5X
versions. Ed might have more insight on this. It could be, for example, that
Digital was working on one or more versions to be labeled 4.5X but these
versions never saw public release, and when Force got the code they thought
they'd made enough changes to bump the version number up to 4.6X. Or
possibly Force had some internal alpha/beta versions numbered 4.5X and made
the public releases 4.6X. One interesting thing about version numbers is
that you never really know how they came to be what they are unless you know
someone who was there at the time or can find proof. For instance, some of
you may be familiar with the BEX word processing and Braille translation
software for the Apple II line of computers. This software was produced by
Raised Dot Computing. A few years ago I was going through archived RDC
newsletters and found out something interesting. Apparently the first
private beta version of BEX was version 1.0. There was a second private beta
with a version number of 1.5. Because of this, BEX's first public release
was version 2.0.
Jayson
----- Original Message -----
From: "Alex H." <linuxx64.bashsh at gmail.com>
To: "DECtalk Discussions" <dectalk at bluegrasspals.com>
Sent: Monday, July 11, 2011 10:07 PM
Subject: Re: [DECtalk] Weather dectalk
> Hi,
>
> That's probably right. I know there are a lot of minor versions of DT
> in the 4.4x version, and they didn't have a huge impact on sound, but
> when stuff hit 4.61 things went down the tubes, thanks to Force
> Computers Inc. The Fonix saved the day, sort of.
>
> BTW, does anyone know who currently has all the speak demos or the
> rights to them now? I'd shudder to think that there's little minor
> versions and the whole 4.5x version of DT that has no demos accounted
> for, and of course DT 5.0. I'm thinking if they're public domain, even
> with some non-decompilable code for DT in them, they should be
> mirrored and available to try.
>
> Alex
>
> On 7/11/11, jake mcmahan <mcmahan.jake at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I heard this a while back. The version of dectalk that the noaa weather
>> service used was dectalk 4.46, and the year on the noaa website in
>> dectalk's history said 1997. So I am beginning to think that that
>> version was released then or before.
>> _______________________________________________
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>> DECtalk at bluegrasspals.com
>> http://bluegrasspals.com/mailman/listinfo/dectalk
>>
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