Sam

Lucasarts developed the game Sam and Max, and forever changed my life by doing so.

In what other games do you get to bungee jump from your favorite President's nostril? Or destroy all civilization in western North America to save a bunch of smelly bigfeet?

There are several types of radar-guided missiles. Some, such as the AIM-54C Phoenix and AMRAAM (both air-to-air), have onboard radar or other sensors which are used to guide the missile to the target, either starting some time after launch or at launch. Others, like the HAWK, Patriot and Standard Missile, use ground-based radars to not only detect and track targets, but to guide the missile all the way to intercept (Actually, I need to back down; I don't know if the Standard uses onboard radar at any point). These systems take their image of the target and their image of the missile, and send commands to the missile along radio or wire links until intercept. These systems may require additional 'handoff' guidance radars which can spend more 'time' on a target that a missile is heading towards. You will occasionally see smaller radar installations on Aegis ships in addition to the SPY-1D or SPY-2 radar; that's what they're for. They can also be used to communicate with the missile. It is not uncommon for these systems to have very short-range sensors in the missile that take over when they are close enough to the target, freeing the tracking radar for other targets/tasks.

Finally, there are 'passive homing' systems such as Sea Sparrow. In these systems, sensors in the missile 'see' the reflected radar energy from the target that is generated by the main ground-based radar, and use those signals to guide themselves to intercept. The problem with this (especially for aircraft, for whom the Sparrow was originally designed) is that you must illuminate the target with your radar continuously until the missile hits or has definitely lost lock.

Running a ground-based SAM isn't all that safe, either. See Wild Weasel for more.

A text editor with its roots in the Plan 9 operating system.

Offers vi-like visual interface, but intuitively integrates the mouse with the editing process. Also offers structured regular expressions, and ed-style commands, with unlimited undo possibilities.

Less innovative than its sister editor, Acme, but still interesting in its own right.

I used mostly the present tense to describe S.A.M., since I run it on an emulator, and feel the past tense would be somehow inappropriate.

S.A.M. (the Software Automatic Mouth) is a pure-software speech synthesizer for the Atari and Apple platforms, released in 1982 by Don't Ask, Inc. I have only used the Atari version, so not everything written here necessarily applies to the Apple version as well.

The synthesizer uses phoneme concatenation to create surprisingly convincing speech (well, a little above Speak & Spell level, and that's saying something for the early 80's) from phoneme strings such as "AY4 AEM AH KUMPYUW3TER", and includes a translation utility, called RECITER, which primitively bridges the English-to-S.A.M.-ish gap. S.A.M.'s phonemes are synthesized, rather than recorded, saving precious storage space; This, naturally, comes at the cost of CPU cycles, and so much so, that whenever S.A.M. speaks, it must black out the screen to save cycles.

S.A.M. was not the first speech synthesizer, but it was probably the first speech synthesizer that people could afford, especially since it ran on inexpensive 8-bit home computers. Its cheapness aside, though, S.A.M. offers features that had usually been seen only in astronomically-priced synthesizers when it was released; Particularly, it allows machine language and BASIC developers to include speech in their own programs through a simple interface.

Do You Know Your Apple or Atari Can Already Talk?

An exciting new breakthrough:

{PICTURE OF A 5.25" FLOPPY DISK}

This disk can now make your computer speak!

It's the Software Automatic Mouth - S.A.M.
The brand new, all-software, high-quality speech synthesizer from DON'T ASK.

Incidentally, Sam is also the name of the SAPI voice which ships with Microsoft Windows (2000/ME and onward), sounds like crap, and would not have passed for a speech synthesizer even in S.A.M.'s day.

Sam (?), adv. [AS. same. See Same, a.]

Together.

Spenser.

© Webster 1913.