11:59 AM
JP passes along a link: the first thing the sound files on Casper Electronics bring to mind is the poor power droid being tortured under Jabba's palace at the beginning of Return of the Jedi. For crying out loud, when you've got a machine that we've taught how to talk, don't revel in your ability to make it scream incoherently--make it bust out old-school Dictionaroke style!

For more Speak-and-Spell fun, don't miss the SaS simulators available online, Yesterdayland's history of the line, the Smithsonian's grub-pale prototype, a technical yet interesting design history (PDF) of the toy, and the Datamath Calculator Museum's page on the Speak and Spell Compact, including some MP3 files of what the machine sounds like when it's not being tortured.