Category: Geeks r Us
Today, Mom found a laptop that has always intrigueed me. I originally got it from The Commission, as part of their DOS throwaways, over seven years ago. I turned it on and miraculously, it had built-in speech! It said "Keynote PC" and then instructed me to insert the flash rom disk or something to that affect. I had the disk but stupidly thought that it would somehow ruin the machine. Now, all these years later, I really do wish that I'd installed the disk so that I could get the thing going. It has, behind two pannels, some interesting ports. There's the standard 9-pin male serial, either a female parallel or a female 25-pin serial, what I'm guessing is a vga port (looks like a 9-pin female serial) and then some ports that I can't even recognise! One is a male of some kind, really thin and quite small (maybe cga/never saw one) and the rest are round female? holes.
I was barely able to find anything about this machine on the web, only a brief mention of there being a screenless machine in the 80's called the KeyNote, and then an upgrade called the KeyNote PC Plus (I'm guessing that's what this is), before my beloved KeyNote Golds came out in the 90's. So this is a genuine 80's machine, probably of no use to me, given that even the Golds have very low specs for a modern DOS user. But I'm a synthesizer nut and would love to hear what's behind those speakers! It's certainly not the voice in the later laptops and the much later BrailleNotes and I'm guessing that this is built-in as part of the machine so can't be taken out and used with another laptop. I'd also like to fiddle around with this ancient version of DOS, probably 3.3 or something. But I don't know where the adapter is, and more importantly, I lost the disk needed to restore the machine to working form!
So has anyone ever used one of these? What's the synth and what programs does it contain? I'm thinking perhaps a really early version of KeySoft or it could be totally propriatary, like the Braille Lites, with no access to DOS at all. Then again, they may just have stuck a synth in it, added WordPerfect or Word Star and shipped it off.
Or, it could have some hidden card slot with an early keynote voice card in it.
Whatever it is, it's truly amazing in that regard. I've never seen a DOS machine with built-in speech!
you could easly have master touch on it as well. Ant sure, so don't quote me.
What's master touch? By the way, did you manage to get any success on the laptop. A keynote pc is a really really old device much like the dectalk express; a hardware synthesizer that connected through a serial port. Then, it became a brand of voice cards and the old models were renamed to keynote SA. I believe this change happened somewhere around 1986, but don't quote me there.
The KeyNote SA is actually a standalone synthesizer, the external one in the line. The KeyNote Gold Voicecard is the synthesizer that goes into a pcmcia slot. There may be a KeyNote Gold PC that fits into a desktop but not sure. Anyway, this one is a laptop with a synthesizer built-in. As for Master Touch, I have the tablet, the tapes and the disks but never really played with it. Apparently, it's some kind of tablet that you hook up to a computer that acts a bit like a touch screen by announcing the points that you're touching. This would be far more useful in Windows than in DOS, in my opinion, but I've never thought of it one way or the other, since I never think of the screen in visual terms.
I once had a laptop with a pen you use to touch the screen and do something like that, but it ran windows vista 64 bit with like 256mb of ram. It took like five minutes to turn on, and JAWS made it go really slow. It crashed at nothing, and I never tried the pen.