[this is from Bill Ackerman --rich] Date: Tue, 8 Mar 2016 09:47:11 -0500 Subject: Re: [math-fun] Ray Tomlinson, 74 From: Bill Ackerman <wbackerman@gmail.com> rwg> I met him at the RLE PDP-1, mid 60s, where, I seem to remember, he worked on myoelectric prosthetics. He could chug a 16 oz Coke and and belch RensselaerPolytecnicInstitute. --rwg I remember when email was a disappointing outcome. :SEND <user> would interject (MAIL) when <user> was not logged in. Nowadays :send is called live chat. <wba> He was my mentor and fellow hacker at the PDP-1 in the late 60s. I don't remember myoelectric prosthetics; he was in the RLE Speech Group, working on speech synthesis. He had a hardware engine controlled by the computer. An early version was called POVO, I didn't know what that stood for. It wasn't very good. A later device was called SPASS, the last 4 letters of which stood for "pole-analog speech synthesizer". Its voice was quite realistic. It's standard demo said, in high-quality speech, "This ... is the voice of SPASS." That kind of voice quality was nearly unheard-of in the 60s. I asked him if he could make it say "foo", but he said that fricatives were very hard, and it would come out sounding like "voo". He also wrote a rats-eye-view maze game that was very sophisticated for the capabilities of the PDP-1.