0.2 Demonstrating the speak n spell  (Page 3/4)

The purpose of the simulators was to ring out the design to make sure it all worked before being put into silicon. So, it was a vital part of the product development. Each of the racks held thousands of TTL gates which were hooked up using wire wrapping. We were very concerned about moving the racks in the laboratory for fear of dislodging a circuit board, device or wire. We were very protective of it as it was all we had until the hardware became available.

TTL is Transistor, Transistor Logic known to the industry as “7400 logic”. It was a major product line at Texas Instruments that is still in existence today. This technology allowed us to exactly create the system that was designed on paper by Larry Brantingham. The designer of the simulators was one of Larry’s engineers, Alva Henderson.

By April, 1978 we were relatively well down the road of verifying the design and it was being used to debug the algorithm and listening to the speech with an almost final system. So, the idea of putting it on the corporate jet in Lubbock, Texas were we were developing the product, to Dallas, Texas for a “dog and pony” show seemed the right thing to do.

Once we got it to the TI facility in Dallas we set it up in the executive suite in the North Building at the main campus of TI (Northeast corner of Central Expressway and I610) so it would be convenient for our senior managers and Board of Directors to casually come by and get a feel for what we were doing.

It was one of my more embarrassing moments at TI. I had demonstrated the product using the simulators so many times that I had it down to a relatively mindless process. Our CEO at the time, Fred Bucy, came over to see the demonstration. My method of demonstrating it was to put it in the “Say it” mode. In this mode it would pronounce ten words, showing the spelling of each while the word was being spoken. Once the ten were spoken it would begin the spelling activity based on the same ten words. Once I got it into that mode, I would explain each aspect of the product and what it was doing. But, Mr. Bucy wanted to hear the Speak N Spell talk rather than me. So he interrupted my discussion by saying something like “would you please be quiet so I can listen to the speech”. I have learned since that it is never good to have the CEO tell you to shut up. But, once I did shut up, he did like the product. It was determined that this demonstration had been successful and we flew the simulators back to Lubbock to continue the development of the product.

On the today show

It was decided that we would introduce the Speak N Spell at the Summer Consumer Electronic Show (CES) in Chicago. It was early in June of 1978. As it was a marketing show rather than a technical conference, I was not initially invited to go for the introduction. But with some begging and a promise that I would take tools along to make sure the demonstrations continued to work, I was allowed to tag along. I had decided that the demonstration products would run on battery power rather than have them specially wired for an AC adapter. My purpose for running on batteries was to make sure no one assumed that we were piping in the speech from a back room. I wanted it to be obvious that we were showing the real products and not a simulation. It was an overwhelming success at CES.