Speak And Spell
Remedial alphabet tutor
Calculators became something of a school obsession in the early teens of ‘80s kids, although even the most maths-obsessed pubescent would’ve found it hard to justify a requirement for logarithmic polynomial functions to parents already skeptical that the damn things were allowed in the classroom. This was probably the first generation for whom electronic aids were encouraged and, in some cases, compulsory, as long as the battery compartments of same weren’t used to conceal various useful formulae1 in maths exams. (If you attended Grange Hill, of course, you were required to raise the bar on even this illicit behaviour by attempting to smuggle class A drugs into your mock ‘O’ levels.)
However, it’s doubtful that even the most liberal of junior school teachers would’ve been happy to allow Texas Instruments’ Speak And Spell into English lessons. Replete with an array of bleeps, parps, toots and tics that would put a second-string Star Wars droid to shame, this most vocal of educational toys came fully equipped to instruct and comment in a gentlemanly American way on the user’s ability to spell.
Fashioned in Fisher-Price friendly yellow plastic, with no sharp edges (you get an idea of the target-age range) and a built-in carry handle, the Speak And Spell displayed design cues that would inform some of today’s “ergonomic” laptops. Certain versions sported a ZX81-style touchpad keyboards, others the clicky button type, but all shared the same primitive speech cell (similarly duff voice synthesis was later also popularised by the Currah Microspeech for the Sinclair Spectrum and the thing that Professor Stephen Hawking talks through). The most fun could be had by making him “laugh” by repeatedly pressing the “e” key (or the “o” key if it was Christmas) and even though the educational value of spelling what sounded like “smershwells” or “sinflaps” was suspect to say the least, some of the words did seem a bit rude.
Joining the TI range, the Little Professor tried to pull of a similar trick by making numbers seem sexy or fun but, as noted, by this time the kids had tired of LED-based arithmetic and moved on to the charms of the slimline calculator (ooh – all vinyl wallet and solar-powered liquid crystal display).
Steve
in Calculators, Educational toys, Electronic games
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Reader Comments (24)
I always remember "Boulder, as in rock". And I'd always get stuck on BUREAU.
Then there was that mysterious black rectangle you could rip out, intended for the expansion modules that your parents were always too tight to buy.
Another thing to note was the lovely smell the plastic these things were made of had. That's what I remember the most, I think.
I read the "Fun with Words" booklet that came free with my Speak and Spell several times over...
This came with a number of game cards which were slotted over a martix of squares & would have a different combination of squares to press.
The music card had simply 4 tunes to play on one side (Frere Jaques, Happy Bithday, Jingle Bells & ???), & a super primitive composer (like one on a mobile phone). There were only a limited number of games so even with the extra set of cards eventually it was possible to work out the right answers. Mine might be at the back of my garage. I know the intructions went with a load of only Lego instruction bookets.
I was recently at 'big gay out' festival in finsbury park, and there they had an area called 'the enchanted forest of david hasselhoff'. In this forest, amongst other things were speak 'n' spells hanging from trees! how fun! ?I had never realised they sounded like the hoff, but when you think about it...
Oh God! It was worse than when I saw that Edd The Duck lunchbox in a Childhood Museum. You can't go back. How long before I start telling people they don't know they're born.
I work in speech synthesis myself these days, which among other things, does actually mean I get paid to type rude words into computers and see what they say. That's a fringe benefit when you're my age. Anyway, I'm still in awe at what the people at TI managed to do in a mass-market product. One of my favourite photos ever is one I took of George Doddington, the guy who headed up the speech team for Speak and Spell, holding up that distinctive orange casing and looking distinctly non-plussed about the whole photograph. That guy's a legend in speech coding. Don't you dare call his stuff duff.
I never had a Speak and Spell of my own. TI products came into my life through Little Professor version one, though, which probably did make me the geek I claim not to be today. I also had the more obscure Dataman and Letterlogic (the latter, I suspect took much of the non-speaking bits of Speak and Spell, and sold it at a more parent-friendly price).
Yet, here was Texas Instruments integrating clear and legible speech synthesis electronics into an EDUCATIONAL TOY back in 1978. Staggering!