I wonder if that was related to "\n", or if the synthesizer intentionally mapped nonprinting characters to sounds (that would seem to make the command set more complicated than necessary, but bytes were precious then so what do I know.)
From dim, distant memory, every one of the 255 characters had a sound mapped to it, though surely I'm misremembering since there are only about 40 distinct phonemes in English.
I just remembered that it was called SAM, and here's the Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Automatic_Mouth Ah, memories...