--Pflam 09:18, 8 September 2009 (CDT)

Speak and Spell - The first widely used hand held computer learning tool

Overview

The original Speak and Spell was introduced to the public in June of 1978 to the Consumer Electronics Show by the Texas Instruments company. This early introduction would make the Speak and Spell one of the earliest hand held devices to feature a visual display and be able to play interchangeable game cartridges. This toy was designed by a man named Paul Breedlove, and was the product of Texas Instrument's long work and research on speech synthesis. This product was intended to help children pronounce and spell 200 of the most commonly misspelled words, and came with 3 games already programmed into the console including Mystery Word, Secret Code, and Letter. The display used by the Speak and Spell was a VFD (Vacuum Fluorescent Display) screen. The chips used to store the speech synthesis data were 2 128 Kbit metal gate PMOS ROMs, which were the largest and most advanced of their time. The interchangeable game cartridges were freely exchangeable ROM libraries that contained the data for new games or words. ^[1]

Significance

The speak and spell is significant because it advanced further the amount of ROM stored on a certain chip, up to 128 Kbits at that time, it started the idea for all handheld games, like the PSP or Gameboy in todays society. It is also significant for being one of the first portable electronic learning tools, and its feature of speech synthesis, which had never been done before unless on a recording.