Subject: ISA Expansion Box

From: "Glenn Ervinat home" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed Apr 23 13:13:46 2003

Hello Jeff,
I saw your post on the IBM machine which used an ISA Expansion Box, and I am
looking for such a box, or 2 or 3.
Would you know where I could get my hands on some?
The Blind (myself included) like using our synthetic speech cards along with
the software synthetic speech that comes from the sound card.  Usually the
sound cards produce a more pleasant speech output, but if the soundcard
stops working, we are screwed, so we would like to keep using the older
speech cards (ISA).
I have been doing some web searches without much luck.
Thanks for any leads.

"Live long and prosper",
O. Glenn Ervin (Lenny)
N0YJV
Northeast Nebraska
e-mail:
[email-masked]
The above address can also be found on MSM.
or my work e-mail:
[email-masked]

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From: "pmulry" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu Apr 24 02:19:00 2003

i've never actually seen one of these.  If somone has clear pics can they
make them available for download. if not to complicated might be able to
make one using an isa riser card that came with an old 486. do they connect
to serial port or piggyback an isa slot?

paul

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From: Ethan Dicks <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu Apr 24 10:43:34 2003

--- pmulry <[email-masked]> wrote:
> make one using an isa riser card that came with an old 486. do they
> connect to serial port or piggyback an isa slot?

They are a box with a passive ISA back plane and a pair of ISA cards
that are connected with a single round cable about as big around as
your thumb.  The box itself is styled like an XT (down to the sloping
front).

-ethan
The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo
http://search.yahoo.com

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From: Tothwolf <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu Apr 24 18:55:00 2003

On Thu, 24 Apr 2003, Ethan Dicks wrote:
> > i've never actually seen one of these.  If somone has clear pics can
> > they make them available for download. if not to complicated might be
> > able to make one using an isa riser card that came with an old 486. do
> > they connect to serial port or piggyback an isa slot?
>
> that are connected with a single round cable about as big around as your
> thumb.  The box itself is styled like an XT (down to the sloping front).

Of course, those are 8 bit only. There are 16 bit solutions available, but
they are usually marketed for industrial computer uses, and tend to be a
little pricey.

-Toth

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From: Frank McConnell <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu Apr 24 19:59:00 2003

> your thumb.  The box itself is styled like an XT (down to the sloping

The original poster was describing an intended use for these to enable
use of a speech-synthesis card on what I'm guessing is a more modern
PC with a sound card, as a backup for when the sound card or its
drivers fail.  I guess what I'm wondering is, how is this supposed to
work with shiny new PCs that have no ISA slots, and is that what the
poster is really after?  Probably completely off topic though.

As long as I'm off the rails, some other ramblings:

A blind former ex-cow-orker used to use Artic speech synthesizers to
work her computers.  I remember her having both an ISA card and an
external box about the size of a paperback book (maybe a bit thinner
and longer) which attached to the PC via a serial port, and later
another smaller Artic external box (about half the size of the older
one).  These were something of a nuisance due to copy protection -- it
wasn't enough to require the speech synthesizer hardware, the Artic
software was keyed to the specific speech synthesizer.

Later (I'm thinking 1997 or 1998) she switched to using a software
package called JAWS from Henter-Joyce.  This could either use the
Artic synthesizer or the Windows audio drivers (she was running NT 4.0
on her notebook PC).  She liked the voice of the Artic box (because
she'd been using it for years and had got used to it), but rapidly got
used to the software speech-synthesizer code because it meant one or
two less things to have to carry around.

JAWS was also copy protected, with a key diskette that allowed some
small number of installations to hard disks -- you could also
de-install and increment the counter on the key disk in order to move
the installation, but of course if the hard disk got whacked then you
might not have the opportunity to do this.

-Frank McConnell

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From: "pmulry" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu Apr 24 21:33:01 2003

ok, i took a tangent (my mind works that way) :-(
all roads lead to rome  :-/
all hamburgers are not macdonalds  :-|
all opsys's are not microsoft  :-)

---

From: Tothwolf <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu Apr 24 22:33:01 2003

On Thu, 24 Apr 2003, Frank McConnell wrote:
> use of a speech-synthesis card on what I'm guessing is a more modern PC
> with a sound card, as a backup for when the sound card or its drivers
> fail.  I guess what I'm wondering is, how is this supposed to work with
> shiny new PCs that have no ISA slots, and is that what the poster is
> really after?  Probably completely off topic though.

I think there are PCI to ISA solutions available for the industrial
computer market. The real drawback is price, as they tend to be pricey,
just like the 16 bit ISA ones I mentioned.

-Toth