What are the origins of our modern day text-to-speech systems? In this episode we will dive into the rich history of electronic talking machines. Along the way I will tell you the story of the vocoder, the first singing computer, and a little about the father of modern synthesized speech.

In 1086 William the Conqueror commissioned a survey of England that would come to be known as the Domesday Book. 900 years later the BBC would create a similar survey, called the Domesday Project. This new survey spanned two LaserDiscs holding over a gigabyte of data and 200,000 images, most of which were collected by students. It presets an amazing time capsule of the UK in 1986. Also contained within the disks were 3D virtual walks of the country side, and an entire computer generated gallery. So how did such strange technology come together to commemorate a 900 year old manuscript?

This piece covers the development of the first networked computer system, the Julius Tote. It was an analog computer used to collect bets from gamblinb booths at race tracks, calculate odds, and manage payouts. Built entirely from mecahnical compontents some models weer able to network up to 1000 input stations. In the episode we look at it's development, aswell as other early analog computers.