A pair of carefully painted lips, a feathered head-of-hair,
pearl earrings, a pink button-down beneath a blue sweater, synthesizer music, a
personal computer with a floppy drive, and a monochrome display. Welcome to the
1980s.
At first, the display is blank, except for a flashing green
cursor. Is it waiting for someone to type? No, it’s not. This PC is different
from the average DOS machine. When those carefully painted lips say the word
“speaking,” the letters arrive on the display, as if by magic. Then we see that
those lips belong to a perfectly coiffed spokesmodel. “I talk,” she says, “and
the words appear on the computer screen.” And then these words appear on, well,
you get the idea.
This little piece of computer history appears in an IBM
promotional video that says as much as about the culture of the times as the
technology (see above). The year is 1986. IBM is still the king not only of the
PC world, but the tech world as a whole, and with the video and a spokesmodel
that could come from no other decade Big Blue shows off its early efforts in
speech recognition software. Read more.
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