PDP-8, with experimental speech input device (October 1969)

• P.D.P.8, with experimental speech input device (oct, '69: B.E.C.) Catalogue 2
• Simon Lavington wrote a brief summary of the University's work on speech conversion in July 2023 and that provides a good introduction.
  
• See SET0029 for the prior Atlas-based system.
  
• Brian Carpenter confirmed that the date in the title is correct and that this photo was taken in the Dover Street Building before the move to the Kilburn Building. (email from Brian Carpenter to Simon Lavington, June 2023. Brian is retired and living in Auckland, NZ)
  
• The hardware included Peak Amplitude, Turn Around and Zero Crossing detectors and is fully documented in Brian Carpenter's PhD thesis. The complete system including the software on the PDP-8 constituted a speech recognition system.
  
• See also P1257G-I561A, P1259G-I562A and P1261G-I563A which are about a year later.
  
• Following Brian Carpenter's PhD the speech recognition system was moved to the new Kilburn Building and used for a small number of student projects, see P1263G-I564A, P1266G-I565A and P0960G-M341A.
  
• In the background on the right an ASR33 teletype can be seen. Simon Lavington wrote "As Wikipedia says: "The Teletype Corporation introduced the ASR Model 33 as a commercial product in 1963" and an ASR33 arrived in the Department soon after 1965 (as far as I remember) when the first PDP8 arrived." (email to Jim Miles 19/01/2023.

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ID: P1255G-I560A. 3887x2600 (+TIFF) . Copyright: unknown. Collection: The Departmental 35mm slide collection which includes copies of most images in the earlier collections. Source artefact: P1255G-I560A, 35mm slide, condition: Good. This artefact has a duplicate: P1256G-I560B.

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Edited 29-Jul-2024 (Jim Miles)

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