Electronics
The display was a vacuum fluorescent display (VFD). Speak & Read units used a membrane keyboard for input. The Speak & Read used a single-chip voice synthesizer, the TI TMC0280 (later called the TMS5100), that was also used in the Speak & Spell. The TMS5100 used a 10th-order linear predictive coding (LPC) model and the electronic DSP logic.
LPC encoded speech data was stored on a pair of TMS6100 128 Kbit metal gate serial PMOS ROMs. 128 Kbit was a very large capacity ROM in the early 1980s. Additional memory modules could be plugged into a slot in the battery compartment and selected via a button on the keyboard. A later model, the Super Speak & Read, had a much slimmer case and an LCD screen rather than a VFD screen.
The unit could use either 4 "C" batteries or 6 volt DC power adapter with positive tip polarity.
Read more about this topic: Speak & Read
Famous quotes containing the word electronics:
“We live in a highly industrialized society and every member of the Black nation must be as academically and technologically developed as possible. To wage a revolution, we need competent teachers, doctors, nurses, electronics experts, chemists, biologists, physicists, political scientists, and so on and so forth. Black women sitting at home reading bedtime stories to their children are just not going to make it.”
—Frances Beale, African American feminist and civil rights activist. The Black Woman, ch. 14 (1970)