I remember years ago, the Manitoba Department Of Education in their advanced
refinement threw away 27 optacons in the city dump. 27! Not good at all,
that. Perhaps Doug me fellow Winnipegger remembers it as well.
I wonder what ever became of the several stashes I know of filed with TSI
talking calculators; those speech compressors one would plug into a variable
speed cassette machine so the reading voice would not sound like Edith
Bunker as a little girl, but would adjust the voice to sound more or less
normal no matter the speed setting of the cassette player; oh yes and dozens
of optacons and their accessories.
I do know where one stash of this equipment retires in its slow decay, and
quite a number of optacons in that stash as well. Will they give up the
stuff? No, of course not.--Why not? That would make too much sense, and
"it is our's" or the government's, so they stay right where they have been
for years. How many times have I encountered this same illogical and really
frustrating reasoning in government and other organizations!
The optacons speak for themselves; the TSI calculators have a speech board
which could be used (we used to trick those talking calculators and the old
nifty Sharp talking clocks into saying weird stuff and making all kinds of
noises); those plug-in speech compressors ... no doubt a use can be made of
them. We also had great fun speaking into them via an amplifier and
microphone, and our resulting voices sounded like Archy Bunker's great uncle
who needed to clear his throat and should have gargled with cognac.
The speech from those nifty TSI calculators sounded like a cylon from
BattleStar Galactica from 1978-1980.
If I could find an undetectable way to get into that forgotten storage room,
I'd load up and liberate these things, most especially the dozens of
optacons and their accessories. Shame on them. May the fleas of a camel
infest their armpits.
Charles
-----Original Message-----
From: Debby Franson
Sent: Monday, July 31, 2017 9:31 PM
To: optacon-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [optacon-l] Re: New Optacon
Hi Peter!
I didn't have to pay for optacon training either when I went to
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I had to have enough money to stay in a dorm
that was near where the training was and for food. There were a number of
restaurants in close proximity to where I was staying. The $1,000 was for
my part of the cost for the optacon.
That was nice you eventually got to keep your optacon at no charge.
Debby
At 05:25 PM 7/31/2017, peter wilkins wrote
Here in the UK, Optacon training was provided free of charge.
The machine itself was purchased by my then employer.
When I was made redundant, and knowing that there were other
Optacon users in the company nationally, I offered my Optacon
back to the management, but no-one took the offer up, so I was
told to keep it.
Peter
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