I said I would donate whatever was needed.'Įqualizer first ran on an Apple II computer linked to a speech synthesizer made by a company called Speech Plus. 'He called me the next day and confirmed it. 'I asked if it was Stephen Hawking, but he couldn't give me a name without permission,' says Woltosz. Woltosz had created an earlier version of Equalizer to help his mother-in-law, who also suffered from ALS and had lost her ability to speak and write. King spoke to the CEO of Words Plus, Walter Woltosz, and asked if the software could help a physics professor in England with ALS. Martin King, a physicist who had been working with Hawking on a new communication system, contacted a California-based company called Words Plus, whose computer program Equalizer allowed the user to select words and commands on a computer using a hand clicker. As a result, Hawking irreversibly lost the ability to speak.įor a while, Hawking communicated using a spelling card, patiently indicating letters and forming words with a lift of his eyebrows. To help him breathe, they also performed a tracheotomy, which involved cutting a hole in his neck and placing a tube into his windpipe. Hawking was flown to Addenbrooke's Hospital, in Cambridge, where the doctors managed to contain the infection. The doctors asked Hawking's then-wife, Jane, whether they should turn off the life support. In the hospital, he was put on a ventilator. Hawking lost his ability to speak in 1985, when, on a trip to CERN in Geneva, he caught pneumonia. Intel has been providing Hawking with customized PCs and technical support since then, replacing his computer every two years.

Moore noticed that Hawking's computer, which he used to communicate, had an AMD processor and asked him if he preferred instead a 'real computer' with an Intel micro-processor. Stephen Hawking first met Gordon Moore, the cofounder of Intel, at a conference in 1997.

Microsoft desktop voices 2015