Quote:
Originally Posted by DNSB
I can't help but wonder what you were reading ebooks on in the 1968-1978 timeframe?
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I am not the person to whom this question was directed, but...
I created my first "ebooks", starting in the summer of 1977, by transcribing a number of sci-fi titles directly into a VT-100 terminal connected to a DEC PDP-11. The files (ASCII text) were saved on 8" floppy disks. I did this, in part, to help myself learn the TECO editor - grandfather of EMACS - and also because I had a feeling that soon we would have something portable enough to read these books with. That realization came a few years later with the Tandy Model 100, followed quickly by the Casio Zoomer, Apple's Newton and, finally, the Palm Pilot. Those files I created 41 years ago still survive today, and have traveled from that PDP-11 to an Apple II, IBM PC, Tandy M100, Commodore 64, Commodore Amiga, Apple Macintosh, Palm Pilot, HP PocketPC, Psion Organizer, a number of cell phones, and finally to my Kindle.
EDIT: Almost forgot - I *also* used that PDP-11 in 1977 (it had 12-bit A/D and D/A converter boards) to experiment with converting audio to digital waveforms, a good decade before digital audio became a thing. Unfortunately, the storage media of the era allowed only a few tens of seconds of capture, so I was not thinking in terms of audiobooks that early.