[TUHS] speak.c, or sometimes the bits are under your nose

Hi all, in the past few days I've been getting some interesting e-mails from a new TUHS member, Jonathan Gevaryahu. He has been searching for some lost software, and his story of how he found it is a good reminder to check through all the zeroes and ones on the digital media at hand. With his permission, I reproduce the e-mails below. Cheers, Warren Hi, I'm Jonathan Gevaryahu, one of the developers of MESS but also a speech synthesis history buff. I've been trying to find a copy of the old unix 'speak' command source code and rule tables that M. D. Mcilroy wrote back in 1974ish, but the TUHS archives only have the man pages for it, and not the actual program or its tables. As for the "why?" of this, its an important piece of history, and the phoneme set used on the Federal Screw Works "VOTRAX" Model VS-4 unit which was used with 'speak' at Bell Labs is compatible with the later Votrax Model VS-6 unit at CHM, and also with the Votrax "SC-01" chip used in some arcade/video games, several computer peripherals, and on the "Type 'N' Talk" and "Personal Speech System" products. So actually running the old code and having it speak should be quite doable, if we can recover enough of it to be useful. [ Jonathan assumed that the 'speak' source code had been lost. ] I even asked Doug McIlroy about it a few years ago and he didn't have a copy, and I had assumed it was just plain lost... Until today. I was poking around in random TUHS files (after reading about the v1 unix restoration project) and noticed that the size of recovered files from the ritchie v6 tapes in the .tar.gz files is actually significantly smaller than the tapes themselves. I assumed there had to be some other data there, possibly corrupt or fragmentary, and got down to peeking at the file contents themselves. There were some mentions of speak.m and .c and .v, but finally, in http://minnie.tuhs.org/Archive/PDP-11/Distributions/research/Dennis_v6/v6do… I found the remains of the speak program. See http://pastebin.com/FdvRYM2T for what I've managed to recover so far (actually since i pasted that I recovered a good deal more of it, but a lot is out of order and bits are missing) The file is fragmentary as far as I can see, and is only speak.c (the .m file containing the rules I haven't found yet, but since Doug has a scanned copy of the paper describing speak on his website, hopefully I can just regenerate the rule tables if needed), but it is there! Hopefully speak.m or .v are still waiting to be found on that or one of the other tape images. Also there are other things on that tape like the chess program, and tic tac toe, which may not exist elsewhere. (Though, for these two I honestly haven't checked) Also, in the last 5 minutes I found a chunk of what I'm pretty sure is either speak.m or speak.v, so there's more than just the .c file there. Further progress attached of recovering speak from deleted disk pack sectors: I have all of speak.c in order except for one 512-byte sector, which was overwritten at some point, in the phoneme table. (This has to be the least "damaging" sector of the entire program. lucky!) I also have a good chunk (maybe 50-60%) of what may be a mix of speak.m and speak.v, both out of order. I did not yet find a copy of 'speakm', the rule displayer program for speak.m/.v. There is a program, located after speak.c on the disk image, which looks like it would convert numbers and months to their full speakable names. In addition, either slightly more or slightly less of the files may be intact on the http://minnie.tuhs.org/Archive/PDP-11/Distributions/research/Ken_Wellsch_v6… image, which appears to be originally an exact dd-copy of the dennis_v6 disk packs. Ok, here's the 'repaired' speak.c file, with the missing entries of the table filled in (this was IMMENSELY helped by the fact that speak.o, the compiled object file, was also on the disk pack and appears to be fully intact including the table; the ruleset files are fragmentary so far.)