My last post was about my junior year of high school where I enjoyed a literature class with the Queen of Symbolism. In that post I briefly hinted that while I disliked literature class in general, I have always enjoyed writing creatively. I remember writing in 8th grade a rather long and fanciful story about a dream. In truth I didn’t actually have the dream, but it would have been a super-cool one if I had. It was a simple assignment that I unnecessarily made more complicated (which is not a new thing), but I recall thinking even back then that this writing thing was kind of fun.
The next bit of ‘writing’ I remember doing was a series of lessons in 10th grade in for our world history class. The basic idea in our class was that each student was assigned a section of the current unit to thoroughly read and understand and then present to the class as we went through the unit. Not being satisfied with that simple assignment, I decided to create a time traveling computer…
No, really.
Okay, so it wasn’t a REAL computer, and it didn’t REALLY travel through time. However, it was still kinda neat. See, we had recently added a new sound card to our computer: the latest Sound Blaster. People today take computer audio for granted since just about every motherboard comes with great-sounding audio output. Back in the day you needed an actual sound card to produce anything more than standard beeps. Enter the Sound Blaster.
Bundled with a Sound Blaster was a neat little program called Dr. Sbaitso (which is an acronym for Sound Blaster Artificial Intelligent Text to Speech Operator – don’t you feel smarter?). The program produced a robotic sounding voice that would simulate conversation as you typed in questions and statements. However, I learned pretty early the magic of the phrase “say”. If you typed “say” and then another phrase or number, the program would repeat whatever you said. I immediately knew I would have lots of fun with this. Here’s a video of Dr. Sbaitso in action.
At any rate, I decided at some point during one of my world history classes that it was time to put Dr. Sbaitso to use for the betterment of our education. Thus begins the story of how C.E.T.A.S.T. (pronounced ‘see-taste’) was born.
C.E.T.A.S.T. (which I’m now shortening to Cetast because I’m tired of typing the dots and uppercase letters already) stood for Computer Engineered Time And Space Traveler. What I would do is turn my assigned section into a lesson that was instead then taught by Cetast. I’d write a monologue at home and then have him ‘say’ it one line at a time while I recorded on a little cassette recorder. Then, when my turn came up on the appropriate day in class, I’d simply go to the front of the room and press play.
He was a hit.
I remember creating an entire back story for him and everything. The details are a bit fuzzy but the first time I presented a Cetast lesson I think I described how I came across this time-traveling computer that was bundled with all these archives. And of course, the recordings were on the oh-so-convenient futuristic medium of…cassette tape.
Totally believable, I know.
So anyway, I’d “borrow” the archives from Cetast and bring them in to play for the class. As one would expect, I’d do this on my 1980s era handheld personal cassette recorder because I was cool like that. I mean, if you had a time-traveling computer at your house isn’t that what you’d do? You certainly wouldn’t bother to ask him why all his recordings were devoid of any mention of anything after, say, the year 1992.
Details…
Of course, believably wasn’t really the point. I fully admit I was just being a little corny and enjoying myself. It seemed, however, the lessons actually did cause my classmates to pay attention. I remember my teacher also loved them. I enjoy learning and teaching history so it was all fun for me! Eventually toward the end of the year and the final lesson I even remember recording an actual dialog with Cetast, where I interviewed him about his travels. That was the last Cetast recording I would make.
He had to get back to collecting and archiving those cassette tapes. Obviously.
Sadly, I don’t believe I ever saved any of the Cetast recordings. Ah well. Who knows? Maybe one day I’ll run into him again and he can catch me up on all the new (old) things he’s seen.
