From what I recall, WOPR's voice was made by having a person (John Wood, same actor as who played Dr. Falken) read back the lines to be said with the words in reverse sentence order, then the recordings were spliced back into the correct order and a bunch of filters (vocoder?) applied to them. I'm not sure if the words were spoken in monotone and pitched up down by varying the recording speeds or not, or if the vocoder did this?
That sounds right. The WarGames DVD has the alt audio track that has the people talking about making the movie. That is probably where I heard about the vocoder. Not sure about them pitching it up or down. The vocoders then were quite a bit more simple than the modern emulators I'm sure. These days they would use autotune I guess :-) The whole reason for the speach is because it would be too boring to watch Lightman just type back and forth. Man, I'm going to have to watch the movie again with all this talk :-) WarGames and Hackers, two greats. - Ethan