Brian Ray's Blog : apple/applevideo.html

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary. --Picasso

Tue, 25 Jan 2005

Apple turns 21

Found in someone's attic in Germany a video found here was released today introducing the first Mac, 21 years ago. Chariots of Fire plays in the backround as a vector art program, a work processor, a spread sheet, smooth type display (from Postscript Type1 fonts, btw), source code, bitmap photo images, a chess game... And finally a computer generated voice introduces itself. In one portion, the computer says in regards to mainframes, "do not trust a computer you can not lift." lol

The program used to create this rad voice over (aka Speech Synthesis Manager) still ships with the OS. If you have a Mac, try this:

  1. open Terminal ( or X11 )

  2. type at the command line:

    $ say 'do not trust a computer you can not lift'
    

The voice should be your default voice on your preferences. To see a list of all voices available:

$ ls /System\ Folder/Extensions/Voices/
Agnes                   Bubbles                 Princess
Agnes, high quality     Cellos                  Ralph
Albert                  Deranged                Trinoids
Bad News                Fred                    Victoria
Bahh                    Good News               Victoria, high quality
Bells                   Hysterical              Whisper
Boing                   Junior                  Zarvox
Bruce                   Kathy
Bruce, high quality     Pipe Organ

If you 'man say' you will see the the synopsis as say [-v voice] [-o out.aiff] [-f file | string ...]. So:

$ say -v 'Bruce' 'do not trust a computer you can not lift'

This so reproduce the voice you hear in the video. Mac and Cheesy, eh.