Almost nobody knows that I was an editor at MacUser magazine. That's because I got hired just about 4 months before the merger between Ziff-Davis' #MacUser and IDG's #MacWorld.
I ended up bouncing to PC World, where I stayed for a decade.
I was hired because I was an inveterate Mac tinkerer, while just a novice editor. So imagine my surprise as I literally just discovered a feature I've never seen before in a Mac system.
I knew the (OS 8.1) system's text editor, SimpleText, had text-to-speech tools built right into the front end. What I didn't know is that, among the range of voices you can choose to read aloud whatever is in the text editor, is a voice called Pipe Organ that literally sings whatever text is in the document in a style I can only describe as 60s-robotic-Gregorian Chant.
And the best part? The tune the voice kind of sings along with is March of the Marionette, otherwise known as the theme song from the TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
You have *not* experienced "new features" documentation about software until you've had it sung to you by a mournful robot with a Hitchcock fetish.
#retromac #retrocomputing #sheepshaver #macos