History
ESS Technologies was founded in 1984 as Electronic Speech Systems, by Professor Forrest Mozer, a space physicist at the University of California, Berkeley and Fred Chan, a VLSI designer and software engineer, in Berkeley, California.
The company was created at least partially as a way to market Mozer's speech synthesis system (described in US patents 4,214,125, 4,433,434 and 4,435,831) after his (3-year, summer 1978 to summer 1981, extended) contract with National Semiconductor expired in 1983 or so.
Electronic Speech Systems produced synthetic speech for, among other things, home computer systems like the Commodore 64. Within the hardware limitations of that time, ESS used Mozer's technology, in software, to produce realistic-sounding voices that often became the boilerplate for the respective games. Two popular sound bites from the Commodore 64 were "He slimed me!!" from Ghostbusters and Elvin Atombender's "Another visitor - Stay a while, stay forever!" in the original Impossible Mission.
At some point, the company moved from Berkeley to Fremont, California. Around that time, the company was renamed to ESS Technology.
Later, in 1994, Forrest Mozer's son Todd Mozer, an ESS employee, branched off and started his own company called Sensory Circuits Inc, later Sensory, Inc. to market this same speech software and other speech technology.
In the mid-1990s, ESS started working on making PC audio, and later, video chips, and created the Audiodrive line, used in hundreds of different products.
ESS is unrelated to the Ensoniq Sound System, another sound card often abbreviated as 'ESS'.
Read more about this topic: ESS Technology
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“History is more or less bunk. Its tradition. We dont want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinkers damn is the history we make today.”
—Henry Ford (18631947)
“The second day of July 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more”
—John Adams (17351826)
“It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.”
—Henry James (18431916)