omeron
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Firstly, I wanted to share a story from my childhood, to explain why I feel so strongly about having a talking native system. And maybe this will pan out to nothing or almost nothing, if not for the value of fun. On the other hand, it could change the world, or at the least, my world. I became blind at birth, and my parents got the first computer with speech and a screen reader: the Apple II/E. Mine still works! Basically, the speech synthesizer speaks, and the screen reading software handles sending text both on screen and typed to the synth, reviewing the screen, and other functions.
Anyways, speaking of BASIC, the Apple had it built into the ROM. You could boot it without a disc and just write programs. BASIC had the same relationship for the APple as FORTH would have in a native system.
I only knew a few commands at first, just load and run and bload and brun to run programs. One day around age eight or so, I decided to try typing in the command "list", figuring it would list something. Of course, it began listing out the lines to the last run program, Eliza. Right then it clicked, that the computer followed these instructions, that it didn't really "know" anything, Eliza didn't really know about me and my medical condition, for example.
So that should help explain why I really feel enthusiastic about a native forth system which can speak. I love the idea of my device running on a native forth system, though as said in another post, using it under GNU/Linux has other advantages. I'd imagine a native system would just fly though! I've heard of the retroforth kernel, does this relate to the Linux kernel? Can we take advantage of speakup? If not, it would mean sending the text through the serial port (in my case at least) and writing some screen reading controls.... certainly doable, but sort of annoying especially at first, but perhaps better in the long run? hmmmmm.......
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