The Null Device

A curious tidbit about the ICL One-Per-Desk, a forgotten 1980s microcomputer (which may or may not have been sold in Australia as the Telecom Computerphone), and the power of human inventiveness:

The rudimentary speech synthesiser built into the answerphone bit of the OPD/Tonto had a limited number of words in its vocabulary in a bid to prevent people from leaving rude messages. There was a competition between ICL employees at the time (the early 1980s) to contrive to construct a dodgy phrase. The best anyone could come up with was "please will you service my secretary".

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