Yes, it's yet another post that deals with stuff I found while cleaning out the rat-hole I live in.
The photo over on the left is from a Radio Shack catalog from 1980. What fills me with glee about this item is that they basically admit that it doesn't work in the description:
Explore this new, not yet fully perfected technology NOW!
It's like they had some extra CB radio parts laying around and didn't know what to do with them, so they slapped together a bizarre computer peripheral.
The only thing online I could find about someone actually using this thing was in an archive of some old Usenet posts:
I remember working (read: tinkering ;-) on a Model 1 in High school (as it was abandoned by everyone once we'd gotten 6 shiny new Model 4 machines) and it had a TRS-80 branded peripheral called the "Vox-Box." It had a Citizens-Band microphone hooked into (I'm guessing) an A-D converter that hooked onto the expansion buss. I actually got it "working" but noticed that the recognition wasn't the best, and IIRC you got maybe 20 words max. The included program let you "teach" the computer digits 0-9 & a few other commands (Save/Load/etc.)
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