It was actually really funny when the answering machine said "please hang up" and then you just walked away disappointed

This is the type of content I need at 2am.

I want the lite version that just says "Please hang up" every time someone calls.

Despite the robotic sound, the early speech synthesis did sound quite good and was quite easily understandable, which is pretty impressive knowing the age of the technology.

"Please hang up." *walks away*

All I can think when hearing that old school speech synthesizer is "Mattel Electronics Presents B17 BOOOMBER"

The logo has an interesting story. Prior to the breakup AT&T wanted to begin selling business and consumer products made by Bell manufacturing arm Western Electric. The DOJ and FCC ruled that they had to set up a wholly separated subsidiary (not part of regulated phone business) to sell the equipment. They were allowed to use the bell name but not the logo, so they hired Saul Bass (the guy who made the last bell logo) to design one, and made the "death star" logo. American Bell took over the Bell Phone Centers and began selling equipment in the early 80s. As this was happening the antitrust case was settled and the breakup was agreed. Originally AT&T was to keep the bell logo, but the final agreement barred them from using the Bell name and logo except for Bell Laboratories, so AT&T adopted American Bells logo and renamed absorbed it into AT&T Technologies upon breakup

I'm kind of impressed with how decent the synthesizer voice sounded for 1983. I'm sure back then they would have expected computer voices to be completely natural sounding by 2017. They're making progress, but we're not there just yet.

The 8-Bit Guy: Weird, even the dial tone sounds different. TELSTAR: PLEASE HANG UP. The 8-Bit Guy: *hangs up telephone* Me: XD

Dude, that synthesized voice sounds crazy natural for 1983. :o That is awesome. :D

that would have been a great telemarketer deterrant.

Telephones connected in parallel, we did not have this in Germany back in the days and this confused me when watching US sitcoms where someone (typically unsuspecting wife) could just pick up the phone and enter another call from the same house (typically cheating husband). Over here the state phone service basically owned all your in-house telephone equipment and they had rules that it must be set up in a way that one phone being picked up means all other phones being dead. This even meant that you could not legally connect a modem in the early days because it was not licensed for use with their network. Fortunately times have changed.

I wish they still made landline phone boxes like this, because it would be great at preventing phone scammers from leaving messages at all.

That voice synthesizer is fantastic.

Real talk: I would put this into service. Pronto.

Oh man that old dial tone beeping.... takes me back.

My parents had one of these still in a box somewhere. They were sold to AT&T employees back in the 80s and as you mentioned, was rather a flop. While the idea was cool, they said that people would say "something weird picked up the phone." People were just getting used to answering machines in the 80s and even many businesses didn't have auto-attendants yet. Really cool to see a working one.

Actually, there WAS a way to call yourself using POTS lines... you just had to be super quick about it. You first dial your own number, then hang up before you get the 'ringing in your ears.' All other phones in the house/on the line will then ring. Once someone answered, you could talk as normal. My neighbor did it ALL the time to call up to her husband's garage, which shared the same number.

I love the way that it sounds like a Speak & Spell. And it looks like it was designed more for a small office than a home. I bought a Panasonic digital answering machine for my parents in the early 2000's. And though it was more reliable and still works to this day, my father preferred the old cassette one, he said the calls sounded better.

Very cool! We had a similar system in the early 90's but it was built into the telephones! You had to buy multiple of the same model telephone and connect them all to your POTS and once connected, they "find each other" and register to a user-set "master" telephone on the line. This allowed you to call all connected telephones in your house by pressing *01, *02, *03, and so on for every room a telephone was connected! It was very convenient for bigger houses (no cellphones back then!). I do love the synth voice on your device though!

Here in New Zealand you could dial 137 then hang up and it would call all lines in the house and it would be silent when you picked up

My great grandmother (who was 101 when she died back in 2014) still used those rotary dial phones from when she first got her house to when she died.

That thing is so cool. I’ve never been fascinated by technology from the 1980s

Ha. A family member of mine had one of these in the 80s. I remember calling and dialing in my number for him to call me back. This was high tech stuff back then and quite impressive!

that's an excellent voice for 1983 standards.

So in order to try this on 2017 you had to go through a digital IP connection with a router that simulates an analog POTS line, to a answering machine that reads on the analog line and stores the numbers digitally? We live in a weird world. On the other hand it is crazy to think that the analog POTS standard is still widely used today, to the point where internet modems "simulate" it.

I like that speech synth. The germans had something similar. That unit did not come in a box but as a special fancy phone that did cost 1000 DEM (about $500) back then. It was called "Telekom Delegatic". It uses speech synthesis with very similar phrases you showed on the video (but in german) and could store numbers or even texts using dialtones with additional frequencies. No answering machine. The storage memory was a 28C16 or 64 parallel EEPROM. A little novelty for it's time.

Is there any place I can find the samples/TTS for that voice synthesis chip? It sounds amazing.

There is one benefit to rotary style analog phones (or at least there was 10 years ago), if you live in a place prone to power outages the analog rotary phones would still be able to place a call assuming only the power was out and the phone lines weren't damaged. Since phone lines and power lines often run along the same poles it's possible both would be knocked out by a fallen tree branch, but if just a transformer blew or something like that happened the phone line powers the old rotary phones.

You were right with the connection between American Bell and the Bell System Divestiture. AT&T introduced the company in 1982 as a separate division from their manufacturing arm Western Electric (due to FCC regulations preventing WE from selling "enhanced" telephony products, but it explains the connection between American Bell and Western Electric). But as part of the divestiture, they lost the rights to the "Bell" brand (with the exception of Bell Labs), so when the divestiture took effect in 1984, they renamed it to AT&T Information Systems until it was absorbed into AT&T itself in 1989 (as the FCC regulations were loosened by that point). American Bell was actually the first use of the Saul Bass AT&T "Death Star" logo, proceeding the use of it as AT&T's corporate logo by about a year. I recommend anyone interested in technology to check out more about the Bell System, especially the Bell System Memorial website. It's a very interesting topic. p.s. whoever made the captions: It's spelled "Ma Bell", no "w".

That thing seems really advanced for it's time. Also it is great that it is still working 34 years later.

Holy crap, that speech synthesizer sounds _really_ good, especially for 80s speech synth.

"Please hang up"

This was an extremely cool device. Never heard of it and I'm really glad you made a video about it.

This explains one of my childhood mysteries. Like almost 40 years ago, I was 9 or 10 or something, we visited some relatives, and I was hanging out doing something, and the person I was with picked up the phone, dialed a number, and then hung up. The phone rang, and they picked up and talked to their mother in another part of the house. And I could not wrap my head around calling yourself, and talking to other people in the house. For years I would try to make that work at my house, or other people’s houses, trying to figure out how to make that happen. Now I know it was one of the these magic boxes in the 80s that made it happen.

WOW, the voice synth technology was *really* very good in the 80s, this is very clear! Thank you, God bless you :)

Good Job 8bit! I really like the the simple way you explain all this retro stuffs

6:28 You could do this with a normal phone line. You would dial your own phone number then hang up. Moments later your phone would ring, and everyone in the house could pick up. Prior to having some good ole 10base-2 hardware, this is a feature my brother and I would exploit to create a connection between two computers to play a game that had a builtin dialer. The software was expecting a dial tone, and the receiving instance of the game was expecting a ring before it would answer. So we would tell the game to dial our own number, then quickly disconnect the line from the dialing computer and connect another wire which we had at the ready for a direct connection. Right after the phone line rang and the second computer picked up, we would disconnect the line from that computer and plug in the other end of our straight wire. Now we had one wire between both computers and they were communicating as if it were a normal modem to modem call.

I'm amazed on how much history I'm learning from your channel. I'm subscribed to both of your pages. Thank you for the videos!

Great video, 8bitguy. It's nice to have a variety of different tech talk on one channel!

Love that classic voice synthesis!

I still had a rotary phone in 1986. Reason: We were a family of six. (plus it was kind of a fixture: large (>ft high), nailed to the wall, center of the house)

don't you just love this guy's channel, that's some real rare old tech.

That synthesized voice actually sounds pretty darn good!

always interesting getting a slice of history. I had no idea 911 wasnt around back then.

Machine might have made it if they put a tape recorder in it.

This was super interesting! This is why you remain one of my favorite channels on KZfaq. Because you present it in a way that is not alienating folks. Info for all. ✊😌❤️

As a telecom guy myself, I found this video immensely satisfying.

Ahh!! Setting voice guide is soooo vintage....

what a gorgeous piece of tech 😊

What we had and still have in post-USSR countries is 3 separate universal numbers for different emergencies, which i think is more convenient. 01 is fire department, 02 is police and 03 is ambulance.

You really have nice content. i appreciate you doing this to teach every kid, teen, adolescent and elder to learn more! i been watching you since 2015! and i still have no shame

The 8-Bit Guy You should make a video about TTY/TDD

Whoa! This would have given someone essentially an internal phone network very similar to what I use at work with an IP phone. Internal extension dialing, "parental controls" etc. Hook up a phone in your kids' rooms that could only call internally, emergency, or your phone number. Hook up a phone in your office, kitchen, and room that could access the main box as well as call your kids for dinner or check on them. Just a few more years of development and maybe they could add a core voicemail box or per-internal-line voicemail. In the 90s my dad actually installed a system similar to this on our Windows 3.1 home PC that took a phone line into our modem and acted as our answering machine. I wish I knew what that software was. It recorded messages digitally in *.wav format on Windows. It's too bad there are so few landlines and everyone has a cell phone. We live in such an advanced age now, there's very little reason to have central home phone/computing hardware like this. I remember going over to a friend's house around 1994 once and they had call boxes in every major room and a central voice center in the kitchen. Sort of like a baby monitor, but all 2-way radios that would be networked by the central unit instead of one pairing. Nowadays everyone has a cell phone and can just text or message on various web platforms, so such a grand internal network is pointless.

My mom and grandma both worked at Western Electric in Indianapolis assembling those old telephones. When that plant closed in 1984 they transferred to the AT&T fiber optic plant in Norcross, Georgia and most of my family moved from Indianapolis to the Atlanta area. My grandma retried from AT&T in Norcross in 1994 after 35 years (including her time with Western Electric). Mom finally got laid off from what was by then Lucent Technologies/OFS in 2002. Nothing to do with this video really, but seeing those names and logos sparked my memory.

I have to say, your videos are what I watch when I first wake up. They help stimulate my brain and get it working faster than much else :D

Also the WE mark on the mystery chip indicates its a proprietary Western Electric chip

Honestly kinda surprised it didn't have a slot for a cassette tape to record messages too, I feel that would have been really useful, and maybe made it sell better.

Unlike many vintage voice synthesizers, this one sounds comforting and more human to me. Interesting...

In 1984/5 we had a hybrid answering machine (likely Phonemate) that had digital voice prompts and menus, and ability to remotely retrieve messages, but which recorded the actual messages to audio cassette (full size audio cassettes). Your greeting, though, was stored on another endless loop cassette. The nice thing about the setup is the caller never had to wait after the greeting to leave a message since separate cassettes were used (unlike single cassette solutions once messages accumulate) and you never had to remember all the remote control code sequences, just your PIN code since all the menus were voice prompted. I believe the model also served two lines, though could only service one at a time if both were to ring at the same time. Ten years later (1996) and I had a two-line fully digital answering machine that I still use to this day (21 years later!) as it does very nicely with good quality speech and audio and can accept around 17-20 minutes of recording time in all (shared between greeting and messages) and allows you to delete messages individually and return that memory to the recording pool, unlike with tapes where you had to erase everything to recover recording time. Never had to pay the telco for voice messaging service in all those years as it did everything they could offer.

When he entered the time "11:42 AM" it is exactly 11:42 AM where I live.

Great Vid and the MUSIC at the end !

This looks like a pretty awesome video! Thanks for all the great content!

Thanks for the video. My dad worked for Ma Bell for nearly 40 years, and was always bringing stuff like this home for our family to use. I remember all those different emergency numbers as well. It sure is funny how old tech just kind of fades away and is largely forgotten.

Loving your videos! Also you have yet to do your history of apple mice video

This was the one of the last vestiges of when Western Electric made bullet proof stuff that worked. The quality of this device versus consumer cr*p that was available at the time is amazing. This looks like it was designed at the time when WE / AT&T was still the Bell System and would lease or rent the equipment for a monthly fee. They made money when the equipment would work for YEARS without need for repair of any sort. Everything they made had design life in decades, not years. Sounds crazy now, having a phone (or associated equipment) that would last decades, but up until the 1980's a phone from 40 years earlier, wired with a new modular plug (trivial), provided the exact same voice service and quality as a new phone off the line.

Thank you for this video, and all your videos in generel. This one however was very interesting because even though the "answering machine" is old, the premise of it still seems cool. I've been a subscriber since you had ca. 3000 subscribers, I'm really stoked to see how many people have begun to follow you as well. Also I have great respect for your decision to go full time as a YT'er. I wish you the very best. Andreas, Denmark. :)

Awesome and unique video 8 bit guy!

An other visitor stay a while say for ever ....anyone else getting an impossible mission vibe from this thing YES IM OLD DANG IT

*boring day* . . . . . *sees the 8-bit guy video* _day saved_

I worked for American Bell at the time and purchased one of these. I was/am a geek and loved the technology of the device. It was like having a small PBX at home. Eventually the unit died and the fact (as you mentioned) that not everyone had touch tone dialing made the unit somewhat impractical. I was impressed with the technology of the device at the time and I want to thank you for this trip down memory lane of a fun time in my "high tech" life. Boy, I miss the old days! ;)

Are used to have a neighbor next-door they had a pager and the reason I like it so much is because whenever the pager would go off could hear the person speak through it, the pager had a speaker, but I also remember the pagers that didn’t talk would just beep.

That answering machine voice reminds me of that AVGN episode lol.

isnt that speech synthesys chip related to the one on the Mattel IntelliVisiion's Intellivoice?

man, you could make a really neat 80s inspired movie with all this old gear you have. every time I see a video of yours I craft a scene in my head that would make use of that tech! I love it!

I just found this channel and is AWESOME..

Last time I was this early it was still the ibookguy

Do you think you will ever do an episode of different analog video connectors and how they work. i.e. RF, composite, s video, component, RGB, and VGA

Keep on the good work with all the interesting topics

YES!!! I CANNOT GET ENOUGH! You call. No one answers. Instead, you are greeted by LINEAR PREDICTIVE CODING!!! I LOVE THE SOUND OF THIS KIND OF SYNTHESIS!!! OK, enough excitement for now. I wish this would also allow you to leave a message with your voice encoded as LPC. That would be amazing.

The voice sounds like KITT

The TI chips always had really cool digitized speech, but they're pretty useless as vocalists. I've used an emulator of this chip to add vocals to some of my music and all the consonants are really muffled. Now the Votrax SC-01, that's got a good tone. And given decent enough pitch control, you can get almost a "talkbox" sound out of it :)

I just love watching your videos while having lunch or dinner :D Keep up your great work! Your videos are one of the best on youtube! Greetings from Germany :D

man, your videos are the best quality per content

Anyone else wish he had used 867-5309 as the test number.

So the US didn't have a standard emergency number until the 90s?! Wow. Britain has had 999 since the 30s!

Great video as usual! Also, great jean shorts. Those are just...classic.

This may be one of my favorite episodes! Do more episodes on old phones and old phone tech! Super awesome!

I think that Apple, Samsung, and Google should ditch their “unnatural” in the name of “natural” voice of voice assistants and adopt this synthesized version for the sake of good voice

Make an episode about old-school speech sythesis!!!!!!!!!!! ;D ;D ;D

Another great video - thanks for this - I find any old bits of tech interesting and you have a great way of presenting them - keep it up and thank you :)

I am from India. We had the ATT answering machine that used micro cassette tape back in the early 80s.. it was very rare to have one in Bombay those days but my dad had one installed. And it shocked callers who were doubly shocked that a machine was talking to them instead of a human being.... It worked very well till 1999 when the mobile phone companies started voicemail and our landline provider started their own custom voicemail on landline to compete with cellular companies... Let me see if I can find that device around the house... It will be fun to relive that experience..

So what kind of impact does this have on a modem attempting to connect? Usually these kinds of devices weren't the "cleanest" pass through given the voltages and quality of components used to bring prices down to consumer acceptable levels...

The media came out with the television show Rescue 911 narrated by William Shatner to get the word out about 911, which helped greatly to get people on-board with using 911.

Love how the stuff in the background is 100% functional, decorative, and uncluttered/untangled at the same time

You always make my day ! You have the most cool and awesome old toys and tech and have an awesome know how for all these things ! Keep up the good work man ! I love all your videos !

Still not nearly as nostalgic as an answering machine that uses cassettes... Although that thing is really cool... and the design just screams 1980s.

At 1:01 the subtitles should spell it "Ma Bell" not "Maw Bell"

Wow, this is something out of the blue. Which is why I love it, great vid.

I'm actually impressed at how clean the voice synthesizer sounds.