bristlehog wrote on 2025-07-05, 15:37:
I've been able to score this obscure sound card
Hi -- I'm surprised to search and find a post somewhere talking about this ancient audio board. When I was ten years old I was rummaging around in my garage and found this exact box, card, speaker, and manual. It had the SDK. I took it to my father and asked him about it, as he had already taught my to program in BASIC on a Commodore 64. He tells me, "Well Son, let me tell you about SDKs..." and this is how I first learned about software development kits, some 36 years ago. We went on to create a voice bulletin board system in Tampa, Florida that had hundreds of members and spanned from 1993-1997. My late father left me a backup copy that he had taken of our creation, including 26hrs of audio recordings from the users of the system at the time. I've been trying to crack the code for years, and the custom-modified audio formats we used across this vBBS. Only after three generations of AI, and the use of the Reverse Engineer Everything GitHub project I've been able to fully decompile the .exe back to source code, including a VOICECON.exe tool that included the exact audio codecs.. I now have been able to fully recreate this "Sanity's Edge" voice bulletin board as a web app and intend to publish it on my website as a sort of historical artifact that anyone on public Internet could "dial in" and hear what it was like as a user of the system.. and play back hours and hours of recordings in the public message spaces that the users themselves contributed. On the heels of this, I find this thread mentioning the exact board we used. Frankly, I've been looking to find one for years, as my father left me this CD backup but sadly it did not come with the hardware. I would really appreciate at least permission to use the photos in this thread, on my website as part of this historical archive. If you now have access to this hardware and are willing to part with it, that would be even more amazing. It has, probably fairly uncommon, sentimental value to me personally. As best as I know, and have been able to find searching back in history, there was only one other voice bulletin board that existed anywhere that was more or less a phone recreation of a BBS (in my case, with a particular style/flair). At the time, this card was considered really for businesses to create PBX style phone trees and systems. You can read a little bit about Sanity's Edge on my website.. although I've come to find through my recent efforts the count of how many people ended up using it was vastly undercounted.
https://www.shouden.us/internethistory.php
@bristlehog I hope to hear from you some day. Please feel free to email me: orbitalgrooves <at> gmail <dot> com
