Anthony Vece writes:
> Do you remember the old TalkingBook machine that were or, looked very
> similar to a Webcore machine?
> 
> They were out in the early 60's.

	I've got to respond to this.

	I worked for the Oklahoma Library for the Blind in the
seventies, the Summer of 71, 72, 73 and 2 years from 1974
through Summer of 1976. I actually worked on a ton of those
"black boxes" as they were called in 1971.

	It was actually kind of lucky for me because the state
had this program where they would hire college students in the
Summer to work for Visual Services which was the next larger
scope in our state's Department of Human Services.

	Usually students were not terribly welcome, but we would
do odd jobs in the vending stands or at the Library for the
Blind.

	That usually meant checking Talking Books for damage,
missing records and the occasional foreign object such as the
hash pipe equipped with residue and or a swarm of cockroaches
that some of the patrons mailed back to us on occasion.

	I didn't find either of those things, but I sure heard
of them.

	I started out that first Summer typing addresses on form
letters from a Dictaphone and it was bone-crushingly dull.
Answering the phone was only slightly better because it was
interesting to meet the various folks in our other Visual
Services offices all over the state and the occasional client.

	Then, they found out I liked to do mechanical things and
could solder, etc, and I spent the rest of the Summer in the
Talking Book repair facility that Oklahoma has.

	The Summer of 1971, the Library of Congress was shipping
out thousands of conversion kits to modify all those old
machines to play the 8-and-1-third RPM disks.

	Those machines were built like army tanks. The amplifier
was a metal chassis with 3 or 4 tubes, a power transformer and
an audio matching transformer. They sounded pretty decent, which
I am sure, some of you remember, and the  new machines would
always ship with a test disk recorded on 33-and-1-third on one
side and 16-and-2-thirds on the other.

	What we had to do was remove the old turntable and
motor and trash it, and then install this kit of new parts
consisting of a new motor that ran at 1800 RPM instead of 3600
RPM, the rubber drive wheel, and turntable.

	We would then connect the motor to the power leads and
it was ready to have a second lease on life.

	I think you also had to drill out one new hole in the
turntable board, but that was certainly no problem.

	That made for an interesting Summer.

	One thing the guy who worked there all year told me was
about the time somebody who had a bit of a problem with the
bottle sent in a machine in to which he had puked beer.

	The worst one of those old black boxes I ever saw was
one that had been handled roughly in the mail. The nut and bolt
that held one end of the audio transformer had shaken out and
the transformer swung around on the remaining screw and smashed
one of the tubes.

	The machine had a nice jingle to it with all that glass
and, when I turned it on after repairing all the obvious damage,
more glass spewed out from under the turntable as it would get
caught between the motor shaft and drive wheel.

	Any how, those old machines were useful for a very long
time. We also scavenged the amplifier chassis out of several of
them and used them for parts and even once as a line driver
amplifier in our radio reading service.

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
Systems Engineer
OSU Information Technology Department Telecommunications Services Group