I wonder if anyone else recalls what may be the final bit of non-
electronic entertainment technology.  These were greeting cards that
had a strip of plastic hanging off of them.  The strip looked a lot
like nylon cable tie, but it was engraved with a series of transverse
grooves.  You'd run your fingernail down the strip and the card would
say, "Happy birthday!" in a slightly eerie but quite understandable
voice.

There may have been other sayings on them (I think they might have
been used for Halloween cards) and I dimly recall there having been
a similar arrangement that used an aluminized Mylar balloon for the
sounding board.

I'm certain that these have been gone for several years, supplanted by
electronic voice chips.  They'd probably have been a bigger success if
they hadn't come along as late as they did.

Now, there _had_ to have been earlier attempts at this sort of thing:
I know about the internal mechanical phonographs used in various
talking dolls (though I don't know their technical details.)

Mark Kinsler

 -- who always figured that there ought to be a way of arranging rumble
strips in road pavement so that the road could talk to you while you
drove.

http://www.frognet.net/~kinsler

 [ What's the machine with brass discs which was used for research
 [ of the sounds of speech?  -- Robbie