Here's a segment of PM Magazine Chicago called "Machines That Talk Back," reported by Bill Ratliff, that looks at Dallas-based Texas Instruments, the makers of "Speak & Spell" and other "talking computers." The report begins with a snippet from the version of Nilsson's "Everybody's Talkin' " that appeared in the film "Midnight Cowboy," and spotlights TI employees whose job is to replicate the human voice for use in a computer chip called "Synthetic Speech," as well as the secrets behind what's inside the computers and what they represent. Screencaps from a TI home computer are also shown at one point in the piece, as is a little girl in front of one of those computers as it describes rockets headed to the moon. This simple (?!) technology would be a precursor to later computer programs such as Dragon's "Naturally Speaking" - not to mention some Internet programs that for many years told us "You've Got Mail!" Introduced by Jo Ann Williams, who ends this piece with the following words of wisdom: "Computers do save us a lot of work . . . but they'll never replace people - they don't have any feelings!" This aired on local Chicago TV on Wednesday, November 19th 1980. About The Museum of Classic Chicago Television: The Museum of Classic Chicago Television's primary mission is the preservation and display of off-air, early home videotape recordings (70s and early 80s, primarily) recorded off of any and all Chicago TV channels; footage which would likely be lost if not sought out and preserved digitally. Even though (mostly) short clips are displayed here, we preserve the entire broadcasts in our archives - the complete programs with breaks (or however much is present on the tape), for historical purposes. For information on how to help in our mission, to donate or lend tapes to be converted to DVD, and to view more of the 4,000+ (and counting) video clips available for viewing in our online archive, please visit us at: www.fuzzymemories.tv/index.php?contentload=donate

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