1992's revolutionary reading device for the blind

Dear Mat, hope everything is alright. We all love you.

I think the "ready for next page" implies that it can scan and process a page while it's still reading out the previous page.

PCMCIA cards takes me back! It stand for People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms.

I believe that when it read that text wrong the second time, you may have accidentally enabled "Geordie mode".

I know you havent dealt with any Hifi Mp3 players for a while but i've seen your AKjr in a few videos do you have any plans on making a video about that in the future? I have one myself and I quite like it

Great video Matt especially under the circumstances. Crazy prices when they were first sold!

I have an interrogation on this one, as it tell you the page scan is finished, does it allow you to scan a second page while reading you the first one? If it can parallel process this that would have made the couple of minutes of ocr not that "long" if you can get a listen while it's computing. PS : flipping heck, great video as always :-)

Some info on the hardware. The CPU is an LSI version of the SPARC architecture originally created by Sun Microsystems. It's a RISC chip and appears to use dual-ported RAM (the skinny black vertical chips in the bottom right of the board), a RAM type which had faster simultaneous read/write than ordinary DRAM, and was mostly used on video cards. Since this was made by Xerox, the general architecture is probably re-used from one of their PostScript RIPs (Raster Image Processors, used to render the PostScript display language into printable raster images). Next to the SPARC CPU is an LSI system controller chip, and to the left of the dual-ported system RAM is 32K of Toshiba fast SRAM for system cache. The big socketed Xilinx is an FPGA, probably used to rasterize the raw scanner input. This generation of Xilinx was advertised particularly for rasterization, e.g. PAL to NTSC conversion. Just to the right of the single-digit debug LED is an Intel 128KB flash module. That's pretty small for the full OS even in those days, so it's probably a bootloader for the PCMCIA card. The empty socket in the upper right is interesting, this could be for a Weitek POWER μP chip, which was the equivalent of the Intel OverDrive CPUs for SPARC systems -- a plug-in accelerator. This would have made for faster OCR.

By the Sea Mat is excellent! ;-)

What a fascinating piece of technology. I can read Braille. My blind friend Louise taught me. Her PC does not have a display, a dummy VGA plug to fool the PC to boot. She has a scanner and OCR software now. Her screen reader talks very fast I couldn't keep up with her.

Loved ones always come first, no need to justify or apologize! I hope it's nothing serious at all, and that they're back in top shape in no time! :) And I certainly don't consider it "worse" than normal, and wouldn't have suspected a thing if you hadn't mentioned it.

The gibberish section sounds like a cross between HAL and an early Kraftwerk track.

And all retro computing enthusiasts in unison: "Change the caps!" ^^' EDIT: Thinking of how far we have come, all chips on that board fit on one or two chips today, heck i suspect a Raspberry Pi Zero could do the job if you gave it a flatbed scanner and the right program. Written in Python with the library pytesseract in a few lines i suspect.

Everyone has the right to a day off(even if the YouTube Ad gods disagree), even without a good excuse. Best of luck to you and your family.

Thanks for uploading a video this week, Mat. Take the weekend to relax a bit, and hope everything works out well. Enjoy those films.

My mind is going, Dave. I can feel it...

I know you don't ever go beyond "flippin' heck!" in your swearing repertoire, but I was thinking that if you ever do your "Mat on Tat" series, you can close with "But that's shit for the moment..."

I have to say that the lads from Radiohead should get ahold of one of these devices. The "going mad" function could be exploited for art and amusemen!

I can't let you do that Dave. I wonder if it could read out braille.

I'd be interested to hear it read "Old McDonald Had A Farm"! There's an edition of Horizon from 1978 called Now The Chips Are Down, which I think shows a prototype of this in the first few minutes. It's on iPlayer. And best wishes to your relatives. Scarborough's near me, and despite me being born a southerner, my grandmother hailed from there!

God bless you and your relatives. A fantastic video. Also, not that your studio is boring, but this was a nice change of scenery! Somehow reminiscent of those "summer specials" they used to do on broadcast television, where a weekly show (often a news programme, or light entertainment) would set up shop at a beach or such. Do they still do that? 🤔 Anyway, in the ISP business — developing and holding training sessions for customer service — I'm reminded of a support call where the customer had voice synthesis on his computer. This enabled the support agent to listen in on the menus the customer was scrolling through! "No, not that one, the one you had before...Yes, up a bit...Now click on that!" Normally customer support is operating "in the blind", as it were, hoping that the customer has understood the instructions and has the appropriate screen on hand. But this one blind customer must instead have made that support agent's day. 😃 Enjoy your time off! 👍

Thanks Mat this was ace. Very interesting video, enjoyed this, including the “on location” footage. Sorry for the circumstances - it’s life and comes to us all I suppose, hopefully we all have someone willing to care for us as you did for your relative. Anyway amazing tech for the time. I’m pleased you keep finding this stuff. Take care.

Great work as ever, especially under the circumstances. Manchester Central Library had a Kurzweil reading machine. I remember it being introduced in the 80s. I didn't look too closely but I knew what it was called because there was a large sign above it. I used to hear the robotic voice while searching the card index (remember those?) nearby. I always got the impression that it was well-used. A quick Google reveals an article, detailing the benefits for library users: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/026461968400200306?journalCode=jvia

Despite the circumstances that was a great video and the end was one of the most amusing things I have heard for a while. It reminded me of when people first got hold of samplers and we got N N N N Nineteen and Ch Ch Ch Ch Chaka Khan

I just wanted to add that this same functionality (OCR to speech) is part of almost all tech for the visually impaired today. It’s a very different world!

I actually had one of these machines. It was “gifted” to me when a family member passed (we were/are both visually impaired). It still is amazing tech and, as always, an amazing video by Mat. But, everything Mat does is engaging and educational. Thoughts for you and your family Mat!

I laughed, I learned, I was amazed. That makes a good video for me. I may get two of the three from other videos I watch, but I watch yours for the trifecta. I did not notice any quality loss in the presentation. I too enjoy the subject of how solutions are created when the technology doesn't really exist yet. Like the ski slope tape player or the background music machines. I would have never thought of playing the bottom of a record. Anyway, great video.

These "accessibility" videos are always interesting. Sorry for the circumstances that made for remote production and hope for the best outcome all around.

It reminds me of When Text to speech apps came into existence. Apple stopped it from saying swear words and it was fun trying to fool it. I wonder whats happens if you ask it to read swear words Mat ?

https://youtu.be/Rt57OdG6EZQ?t=140

1) OMG, made in the USA? Holy carp that's old. Peabody is north of Boston ... don't be fooled, it's not Pea Body, it's Pea-Buh-Dee. 2) In late 1989, I paid US$3000 for a brand new Amiga 2000HD with monitor and Panasonic **24-pin** printer (not one of those obsolete old 9-pinners, no siree) so US$6000 3 years later is really pretty remarkable. 3) This video was great and needs no further editing, IMO. Your stand-up by the sea worked quite well and I would suggest that this is not a bad thing for your programming. Not saying you should do it all the time or even often but don't be afraid to - it was great. 4) Hope your relatives are doing well and thank you for taking care of them! Peter

The collaboration between Ray Kurzweil and Stevie Wonder didn't stop there. They founded Kurzweil Music Systems, which produced some very desirable (and very expensive) synthesisers.

My thoughts are with you. Keep taking care of you and your loved ones.

Good vid. I like these occasional ones about accessible technology. Enjoyed the 2001 reference, too.

Wow that's quite amazing considering how old it is.

Doing a piece to camera from the top of a cliff overlooking the grey ocean is something I uniquely associate with British TV presenters. Very fitting location, too bad about the circumstances.

Oh hey, it's a DECtalk machine! It uses the classic voices and even says "DECtalk version 4.0" on startup. Looks like internally it shares a fair amount of hardware with the DTC-01 and the DECtalk PC expansion card I covered some years back, neat. And Mat, I wish you all the best with your relative(s)! Unexpected incidents like that really have a way of throwing reality into a tailspin for a while, so hopefully things work out okay for everyone involved.

Best wishes to you and your family, Mat. Hopefully the video-making acted as a reprieve from the circumstances and didn't make things more stressful for you. If you need a breather, know that we will still be here for you when you return, no matter how long!

Again an interesting video about something I even didn't realise that it existed! And the PCMblablahblah-card 🤣. In my school age, my best friend proposed to call it "Pucmucia", like "Scuzzy" for SCSI... Wish you all the best with your family, take care!

Best wishes Mat, hopefully thinks are getting better with your family.

Sorry to hear that you've been dealing with a crisis. Hope things improve for you and your relatives. Enjoy your weekend and those old films!

Really enjoyed this video. When I started going to camps and programs for the blind & visually impaired, the tech had progressed to a normal scanner and a Windows app called OpenBook that did the same thing as the Kurzweil reader, but I do remember this was the alternative for those who didn't have a computer. Best wishes for you & your family and enjoy the time off :)

Ah, Kurzweil. Most people would recognize them for the synthesizers, but since as I previously mentioned I am visually impaired and grew up in a visually impaired school program, I was exposed first to their hardware and software for the visually impaired. I didn't experience this one per se, but I did experience their Braille printer (called an "embossing machine"). I'm sure if I heard the sound again it'd take me back, but it'd drive most of you up the wall ;) The highly sped up reading and the erroneous gibberish reading definitely do... For the record, the Braille on the front says "The Reading Edge" / "A Kurzweil Reader" / "Xerox Imaging Systems". This Braille makes moderate use of contractions, so some common sets of multiple letters (or entire words, in the case of "The") will appear as a single six-dot cell. I find it clever that they'd multitasked the scanning of the next page with the reading of the previous page, but then again this has PCMCIA so it's a much newer model. I wonder if the 1970s models have the same capability. A+ at Rap God lyrics. Wishing your family members well.

Thanks for this Matt, especially under the circumstances! Anyway - I have a fond memory of using a variant of this device back in the early 90s. Being partially sighted I attended a school and college for the blind and partially sighted, so had access to equipment like this. In the 80s it was mostly speech boxes attached to BBC micros using screen reader software and Wordwise Plus , outputting from an external text to speech synthesizer (I can't find any pictures, but I think it was from a company called Vortex - you could control the speed and volume from knobs on the front, and it had a headphone jack). When I started College, the technology such as OCR - and more advanced screen magnification software (Lunar - from Dolphin Systems for example) were beginning to get much more advanced. The advent of GUI interfaces such as Windows were a real sticking point for blind and partially sighted users at the time as it ripped up the rulebook! Generally we had all our material photocopied to make it huge or reprinted in large text or in braille - but the cumbersome sizes of the material often made it unweidly. I remember the many volumes of Braille hymn books we had to haul out every assembly - while the large print versions were pretty huge themselves -the were nowhere near as voluminous. Enter the OCR readers. We had just the one in College, but it was a massive, massive help. Pop a page in, and bobs your uncle. It was slow, quite complicated to use, and was kept very much as a resource to be shared as it was so very expensive! At the time I remember it feeling very futuristic. Obviously nowadays we have technology that allows a phone to describe what it sees instantaneously using AI, (Check out Microsof'ts Seeing AI app if you want to see what I mean!). Of course, these Kursweil boxes were too cumbersome for reading lots of complicated text, and were thrown by newspapers and more advanced formatting - they were pretty good for simple letters or book pages that didn't have lots of pictures.

I kind of feel like at the end you should have had it sing "Daisy". The high speed speech is neat, but even for me who likes to watch videos at 1.5X that was way too fast.

Best wishes for your family emergency. Thanks for the video.

Amazing how you can produce a video up to your usual high standards despite the circumstances. But I hope your next video will be a bit late, as that would mean you’d taken some time off.

Really enjoyed that, thanks, always love the bits of humour thrown in with the interesting technology. I hope circumstances get better for you soon.

Love the maching slowly going mad at the end. I hope everything works out OK with your realative.

Tom Scott sounds different this week! Another great video. Hope next week is better for you (and everyone else).

Thanks Mat for sending even a makeshift video out to us while you’re having to manage a family crisis for a while. I’ve been helping family to get through a crisis for the past couple of months myself. Hope your issues can be resolved as well as can be soon.

I laughed at "PMCIAIACCCIIC Card"! Mat, best of luck with the family situation. Appreciate the engaging content as always, including the novel scenery! Take all the time you need -- family first!

Sorry about the circumstances, please do take the time you need for yourself.

Matt “on location” not seen the video yet but I hope you say “ back to the studio”