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Extract recordings from a “voice bulletin board” implemented with Talking Technology Bigmouth software
2600, WBAI, BBS, Bigmouth
XOVOX engineers are fans of the “Off the Hook” radio show broadcast weekly on WBAI in New York City since 1988. Off the Hook is hosted by Emmanuel Goldstein, editor and publisher of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly.
In the 1990s, Mr. Goldstein used to run a “voice BBS” which allowed users to record and replay voicemail messages related to phone phreaking. The BBS ran on Microsoft Windows 3.1 and used “Bigmouth” software from Talking Technology.
25+ years later, Mr. Goldstein and his colleague Kyle found approximately 3000 of the archived Bigmouth messages written in a proprietary format, but they had no working software for replay. They tried unsuccessfully for several years to find a way to replay the audio, and they finally appealed to their radio audience for help. XOVOX heard the plea and received a sample file by email. We were able to identify the Bigmouth audio as unsigned 8-bit PCM with an unusual sampling rate of 7200 samples/second.
Off the Hook subsequently spent several episodes discussing and replaying the old recordings. You can listen to the Off the Hook radio episode from Dec. 2, 2020 in the 2600 audio archive (fast forward 8 minutes to hear the relevant discussion about XOVOX).
