[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.
>> _______________________________________________
>> DECtalk mailing list
>> DECtalk at bluegrasspals.com
>> http://bluegrasspals.com/mailman/listinfo/dectalk
>>
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