Re: [TUHS] In Memoriam: J. F. Ossanna

That one's an urban legend. The PDP-11 was indeed a gift from another department, thanks to a year-end budget surplus. Unix was up and running on that machine when Joe corralled the patent department. Nevertheless the story is consistent with Joe's talent for playing (or skirting) the system to get things done. After Joe, the talent resurfaced in the person of Fred Grampp. Lots of tales await Grampp's popping up from Dave Horsford's calendar. Morris did one port and called it roff. I did the BCPL one, adding registers, but not macros. Molly Wagner contributed a hyphenation algorithm. Ken and/or Dennis redid roff in PDP-11 assembler. Joe started afresh for the grander nroff, including macros. Then Joe bought a phototypesetter ... Yes, in desirability. But Bell Labs had far more diverse interests. Telephones, theoretical physics, submarine cables, music, speech, fiber optics, Apollo. Wahtever you wanted to know or work on, you were likely to find kindred types and willing management. Yes. Credit Joe again. He had a penchant for hooking up novel equipment. When the Votrax arrived, its output was made accessible by phone and also by loudspeaker in the Unix lab. You had to feed it a stream of ASCII- encoded phonemes. Lee McMahon promptly became adept at writing them down. After a couple of days' play in the lab, Lee was working in his office with the Votrax on speakerphone in the background. Giving no notice, he typed the phonemes for "It sounds better over the telephone". Everyone in the lab heard it clearly--our own "Watson, come here" moment. But phonemes are tedious. Believing that it could ease the task of phonetic transcription, I wrote a phonics program, "speak", through which you could feed English text for conversion to phonemes. At speak's inaugural run, Bob Morris typed one word, "oarlock", and pronounced the program a success. Luckily he didn't try "coworker", which the program would have rendered as "cow orker". Max Matthews from acoustics research called it a breakthrough. The acoustics folks could synthesize much better speech, but it took minutes of computing to synthesize seconds of sounds. So the Unix lab heard more synthetic speech in a few days than the experts had created over all time. One thing we learned is that people quickly get used to poor synthetic speech just like they get used to foreign accents. In fact, non-native speakers opined that the Votrax was easier to understand than real people, probably due to the bit of silence that the speak program inserted between words to help with mental segmentation. One evening someone in the Unix room playing with the synthesizer noticed a night janitor listening in from the corridor. In a questionable abuse of a non-exempt employee, the Unix person typed, "Stop hanging around around and get back to work." The poor janitor fled. AT&T installed speak for the public to play with at Epcot. Worried that folks would enter bad words that everybody standing around could hear, they asked if I could filter them out. Sure, I said, just provide me with a list of what to delete. Duly, I received on letterhead from the VP for public relations a list of perhaps twenty bad words. (I have always wondered about the politics of asking a secretary to type that letter.) It was reported that girls would try the machine on people's names, while boys would discover that the machine "didn't know" bad words (though it would happily pronounce phonetic misspellings). Alas, I mistakenly discarded the infamous letter in cleaning house to leave Bell Labs. Doug