For young children in the 1970s and 80s, (compact) cassette tapes with narrated stories (basically children audio books on tapes) were a popular pasttime, not least because it did not require parental presence, because cassette players were relatively inexpensive, and because content (i.e. audio book cassette tapes) was cheap or could even borrowed from friends and libraries.
If you were a manufacturer of educational toys in the 80s, and you wanted to sell a toy that combined the advantages of narrated stories and that could e.g. verify the answer to a question posed to the child in the story, you could not go completely digital.
The problem was not so much the educational part (some keys and a small microprocessor do the trick), but the audio part and the synchronization between audio and educational element. For example, the audio should stop when the user is supposed to enter an answer and only after an answer the system should continue.
Playing audio in acceptable quality digitally was (at that time) very costly in terms of memory and computation. There are estimations that 30 minutes of uncompressed cassette audio need about 30 MB of memory. 30 MB for a computer of say, 1986, would not only mean a RAM size that would exceed the typical main memory size of almost all models (a 1986 Atari ST would maybe have 1 MB of RAM), but also that there would be no affordable mass media to store all this data on. The 1987 HD Floppy has only a capacity of 1.44 MB. Ideally, you would like to use some sort of audio compression to bring the 30 MB down to something more processable. Unfortunately, MP3 is not standardized until the end of 1991 and chips that can decode MP3 in realtime exist only some years after that.
But engineers are trained to overcome such difficulties, so what alternatives does one have? Well, you could use speech synthesis and license Texas Instruments’ Linear Predictive Coding technology. TI’s own 1978 “Speak & Spell” calculator toy does that in order to read the spelling of words. Unfortunately, this system basically allows for only one, very robot-like voice and one has to pre-compute the needed data using TI’s R&D department (i.e. it cannot be done on the toy in realtime).
The other alternative is much more low-tech: you use a stereo audio cassette and have the (mono) audio on one track and the data needed for the educational part on the other track. In order to read the data track, you need a small modem circuit in your toy, and voila: good (mono) audio quality (for the time) and all the possibilities of a small computer.
This is what a large Japanese toy manufacturer must have thought in 1986 when it decided to bring out a toy on exactly this technical basis. This company was the Japan-based “Epoch” which still exists today and which is well-known for Japan’s first successful programmable console video game system, the 1981 Cassette Vision (here Cassette means cartridge), and for its Doraemon and Sylvanian Families toy and video game productions.
Interestingly, I did not found any mention that this toy was released in Japan itself (although that is possible, maybe even likely). Instead, there was a version in the UK, named the Epoch Alpa-1, and a version in France called the Yeno OrdiMagic. Yeno was a French game electronics reseller that sold products under its own name produced by Epoch, Sega, and others. “OrdiMagic” seems to be a word made out of the French word for computer (ordinateur) and the English word magic (I guess the more French “OrdiMagique” was already taken).
It is obvious (when one thinks about it) that Epoch’s toy needed to be modified for the corresponding market. On the one hand, the audio content needed to be recorded in the corresponding language, on the other hand, the keyboard needed to contain all language-specific characters. This might be a good opportunity to show the device and all of its interaction elements. Let’s start with the French version.
The lower part of the device consists of a keyboard with 40 keys. 26 are italic small caps characters, 10 are digits which also double as keys for special french characters, one key is labelled “vrai” (true), one “fault” (false), one has a sad face (which is the correction key) and one has a happy face (which is the Enter key). Above the keyboard there is a switch labelled “Musique” and “Programme”, an LED indicating power (“MARCHE”), one switch called “PASSE”, and a green LED labelled “JUSTE” and a red one labelled “FAULT/COMMENCER”. The upper part has a volume knob, a loudspeaker and a large decal showing the product name and four rabbits in colorful attire. The device has a collapsable handle on the top and the opening to slide in a cassette sideways on the right side. Next to the opening there is a single button for fast forwarding the cassette or ejecting it. On the bottom there is an opening with a sliding top for 4 “D” cells. That’s it. No power switch or any other interface.
The device is switched on by inserting a cassette. The switch on the top allows to chose either the normal cassette player function “Musique” or the educational mode “Programme”.
The following paragraph is a little bit of speculation based on the analysis of an original audio cassette. Still, it should be quite accurate. However, the audio cassette was (due to an imperfect copy process) not runnable on my device. Here is what I assume to happen:
In the “Programme” mode, the device plays the audio track and listens to the data track. If there is data on the data track, the playing stops and an entry with the keyboard is waited for. If the entry corresponds to the data, the “JUSTE” LED is lit, else the “FAULT” is lit. If the answer was correct, the audio part is continued until the next data is found.
The software/audio cassette catalogue contains 13 titles, and it seems there was never another title published. These 13 cassettes are described on the Alpa-1 box and there was a plastic box for Alpa-1 cassettes which exactly holds 13 copies. These titles are:
- Introductory Cassette: A: Visit to Murky Manor, B: Meet the Stars
- 8501 FUN WITH LETTERS
- 8502 WORD MAGIC
- 8503 LET’S EAT
- 8504 BUILDING WORDS
- 8505 ALL ABOUT ANIMALS
- 8506 BEGINNING CONCEPTS
- 8507 THE WORD DETECTIVE
- 8508 ON LAND, SEA, AND AIR
- 8509 ONCE UPON A WORD
- 8510 NOTHING BUT NUMBERS
- 8511 FUN WITH ARITHMETIC
- 8512 MEET THE EXPERTS
The differences of Yeno’s OrdiMagic to Epoch’s Alpa-1 seem to be superficial.
The case says “Epoch” and “Alpa-1”, the picture on the sticker is different. Instead of small caps italic characters, the keyboard contains big caps letters, and there are no special characters on the row with the digits. The “PASSE” button is missing.
We have analysed the (very, very bad copy of the) audio for “Murky Manor”, the A-side of the introductory cassette, probably included in every Alpa-1 box. The MP3 copy of the audio can be found here:
It is basically a series of spelling tasks woven into the story of the spooky Murky Manor. The first word to spell by the user (at around 4:48) is the word “cat”. On the left channel of the audio there is some data activity from 4:51:92 to 4:52:42, for around 0.5 seconds (you cannot hear that on the MP3 copy because this is removed by the encoding). We have cut this part, and slowed it down 10-times to 5 seconds and increased the volume by a lot. Here it is.
The trick of using a stereo compact audio tape with mono audio on the one channel and data on the other channel is not new. The 1985 Teddy Ruxpin toy, a talking bear could move his eyes and his mouth based on signals on one channel of a built-in cassette tape, thus “speaking” with more facial expression (although I think these signals were not logic commands, but directly controlled the corresponding motors).
The hardware of the OrdiMagic is very simple and cheap. Apart from the cassette drive, you have a small PCB with a NEC D7506C microcontroller, and two audio ICs:
The D7506C is a 4-bit microcontroller with 1 kB of ROM and 32 bytes of RAM. It probably runs at a frequency of 400 kHz.
The keyboard on the device is really, really awful. The keys look like calculator keys, but they are not.
If one opens the case one finds that every key has a rigid part on the top (which is simply part of the keyboard cap matrix which is a single, large molded part). A key can therefore only move to the bottom where a protrusion on the bottom (also part of the mold) presses against some sort of sensor matrix mat on the PCB. The rigid top tends to break (given the age) and the the key cap is quite lose in its opening. My OrdiMagic tends to “eat” the tapes, therefore I use an analog-to-cassette adapter for a car cassette player to play tapes.
There you have it, an early solution to the question of how audio cassette tapes and a small computer can be used for educational purposes, the Yeno OrdiMagic or the Epoch Alpa-1, respectively. This toy is very, very rare today as it probably was not sold in substantial numbers at the time.
Technical Data
CPU: NEC [email protected]
RAM: 32 bytes
ROM: 1k
Markets: UK, France
Released: 1986
Original Price: 500FF
References
- TILT JEUX ET MICRO: LE GUIDE 86, pp. 22+23
Rare & Old Computers 
