The original analog-to-digital converter
Posted on May 19, 2005
I was reading an article (online link) in the lastest IEEE Spectrum magazine outlining the research life of James Flannagan, a pionering speech researcher, and came across this amusing anecdote:
… when Flanagan began this work, such simple components as analog-to-digital (A-to-D) converters did not exist. There was no way to get real-time analog signals into a digital computer.Instead, Flanagan and his group would use a photograph of an oscillogram and measure the various amplitudes of the signal. Those numbers were then recorded on punch cards—with a huge stack representing a few seconds of speech—and fed into the computer. The output would be a plot of processed waveforms.
Sounds like a lengthy process.
tags [ speech research history ]
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