Currah

~ the last words ~

Currah made peripherals for 8-bit home computers out of Hartlepool, in the north east of England, and the one that mattered was the μSpeech. Everybody wrote it MicroSpeech because nobody could type a Greek mu. It was a black plastic wedge that pushed onto the expansion port at the back of a ZX Spectrum, and the clever part was how it got the sound out: rather than add a speaker, it intercepted the computer's UHF television signal on its way to the aerial socket and mixed its own audio into it. The voice came out of your television, from a machine that could otherwise only beep.

Out of the box it spoke every key you pressed. The arrow keys came out as "CURSOR," which was either delightful or intolerable depending on how long you had been typing, and there was a reserved variable to turn it off. Inside the case were a ROM full of keyword speech patterns, a General Instrument SP0256-AL2 speech chip, a clock to keep the output intelligible, and a small screw you could turn to adjust the audio.

The company also made the Microslot and a Commodore 64 version called Speech 64. There was a μSource as well, a cartridge holding a two-pass macro assembler and a debugger that could talk to BASIC, with Forth in there too. The range was not large and it did not have long. On 20 December 1984, joint receivers from Coopers and Lybrand were appointed over Currah at the request of its bankers, Barclays. Personal Computer News covered the collapse in its issue dated 19 January 1985 and spent most of the piece on a question that sounds small and was not: who would honor the warranties.

I was not yet a year old when the receivers arrived in Hartlepool, most of a continent away, in a country where the home computer that mattered would show up years later and mostly wearing a Commodore badge. Everything I know about the μSpeech comes from emulator configuration screens, which still list it as hardware you can switch on, four decades after the firm behind it went under.

~ the record ~

~ how it talked ~

You programmed speech by assigning to a reserved string variable called S$. It read what you gave it letter by letter, which carries you through some of English and abandons you on the rest, so for everything else you wrote the sound in brackets. "(dth)is" got you the voiced th at the start of "this." There were sixty-three allophones in total, and pitch was controlled by capitalization: uppercase letters came out slightly higher than lowercase ones. The worked example that still gets quoted, line numbers and all, has the Spectrum saying "okay wiseguy, this is it."

The engineering compromises are what date it most precisely. To save cost the unit had no through connector, so it could not be daisy-chained, and since most joystick interfaces made the same decision you were choosing between speech and a joystick every time you sat down. It also grabbed the top 256 bytes of memory when you switched on and shuffled RAMTOP down to suit, which quietly broke any game that had assumed that space was its own. Some titles supported it properly. Firebird's Booty went further and detected the unit, then handed you a different game if it was there.

~ the collapse ~

The receivers' statement is a small masterpiece of how a hardware business actually fails. At the moment of receivership, a firm called Welwyn was the sole manufacturer of the Currah speech units. Welwyn was holding stock, and under its contract it could go on selling that stock directly until it ran out. But Welwyn had bought none of the support material or the technical backup, which had gone to DK'Tronics along with the exclusive right to make and sell Currah products. So units were going to keep appearing in shops with nobody behind them except Welwyn's own warranty card.

DK'Tronics bought Currah out of receivership and said the right things. Its financial director told the magazine the purchase was meant to ensure the Currah name and reputation were maintained, and the company did keep manufacturing the MicroSpeech while supporting the rest of the range. It also finished the μSource that Currah had left half-built. Several DK'Tronics games supported the unit afterward, which is more follow-through than most buyouts of a dead peripheral maker produce. Maziacs and Zig Zag were two of them. The Currah name went on appearing on shelves for a while after the company behind it had stopped existing.

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