@Jack, I'm just trying to picture the scene for curiosity's sake. Did you accidentally press eject instead of stop during playback, causing the door to open and the tape to just go bananas and start unspooling into the machine?

I would have never imagined such a thing to even be possible.
I remember a player I had as a kid which had a broken door, but you could make it work by just placing the holes over the wheels. I guess it would have failed spectacularly if you tried to stand it up, but I never tried that.

Interesting. The 3.3/3.5 tapes on Jake's site have some computer switching going on. Sometimes when JAWS speaks it sounds different or reads something different in the same lesson. For example, sometimes Eloquence will have an accent and sometimes it won't. Sometimes it'll say when the Windows key is pressed and sometimes it won't. My guess is the recordings were done in different sessions or were updated along the way and there was a different setup.

I remember Teledisk too.

wow! this is freakin interesting as heck.
Sorry but, this is freakin fantastic! I grew up on an under development country, Colombia, were no one could have imagine that we would be able to use a computer back in 1997 or 98. Heck, the first time I had contact with JAWS was in 2001, curiously on september 11th, when I traveled to an event that was later cancelled; they showed me around on an institute for the blind, were they had JAWS installed on a computer along with a  braille display.
Yesterday listening to the JAWS 3.3 rips, which I finally was able to download by using Internet download manager, I came accross something quite interesting, and at the same time I felt like some sort of Nostalgia even though I would have never thaught about the existence of a screen reader for the visually impaired.
The music bed they've used in those training tapes is simply stuck in my head, just put it that way: I dono if we would be able t know where that came from, but that music is simply super stuck in my head and, even by using the amazing powers of audiation I have been able to improvize over it.
Now the voices heard in the training tapes: The one by Michelle Ferguson wasn't quite familiar to me, however a sudden feeling of nostalgia came up when I heard the voice of Earl Ferguson. Yeah, he was the voice who came up first in the JAWS installers! I don't recall in which versin was his voice eliminated, but it was so tremendously freakin awesome to hear that ovice again, since my first JAWS version was JAWS 3.5, someone lended a demo CD to my father back in 2003, but he didn't know how to install it back then.
And that's it about my  thaughts on listening to the tapes found on datajake's website

I do have a Jaws 4.5 what's new cd. Not much nostalgia in actual cd's vs cassettes/diskettes, but that's still safe and will most definitely be digitized sooner or later. For now,
have this Blazie Newsletter cassette from 1998

@Jayde it's nostalgia. I've been on a mission for the past year to track down a lot of auditory ephemera from my childhood.
Since you're a fellow Canadian, perhaps you can relate to the following?
Do you remember Dimoitou from primary school French class?
Dimoitou was a green puppet (or so I'm told), but it was also the name of the French language education program used all over Canada for a couple of decades. In addition to the textbooks, it featured tapes of songs and stories which would have been played by your French teacher during class.
For some reason I continue to hold fond memories of hearing some of those songs in class, so I've been trying to track those tapes down these past seven months. It turns out that this stuff is so rare today that my efforts to find and preserve them are being documented by the media.
No word of a lie: there is a professional researcher and a media outlet behind me, and we've spoken to some pretty high profile individuals as part of this effort.
Do you by chance hold any memories of the illusive 'Dimoitou'? If you were in primary school between 1985 and 2000, you were probably exposed to this.

Trajectory, I just sent you a PM because mail is apparently broken. And I guess I should send you another one with my email address because I forgot to include it, so look for that in a few seconds or something.

I remember a lot about the stuff we used in primary school when learning French, but specifically the name "dimoitou" is not at all familiar, so I'm not sure if we used it.

Christ no. I was mainstreamed throughout primary and high school. I've never attended a school for the blind as a student.
We definitely used different sorts of tapes and whatnot - both for the story we would read pieces of every day, and for our workboos and exercises - but if Dimoitou was an actual character, we didn't use it, or him, or whatever it was.
Now, if you have a link to any sound recordings of this sort of thing, I could definitely listen to it and tell you if we used a similar setup.
The two things I remember well from my French curriculum were these:
in grade 4 or 5, our story concerned a boy named Marc, who fell asleep and had a dream about a time machine, and going back in time.
In grade six or seven, we had a story about people from the 1800s I believe, and in one of the clips I recall vividly, it was talking about how they got separated in a sudden winter storm. If I recall correctly, we had characters in that story named Jean-Guy, Lise, and Marie-Claude.
It's been nearly thirty years since I heard these, though, so I might be cross-pollinating stories and characters.

French is/was not mandatory in grades 1-3 in the Ontario school system, not unless you were doing French immersion. It began in grade four for us, and for virtually everybody I knew. It was mandatory up through grade nine. I took it throughout high school.

Holy, cao!
@skybear: thanks for such valuable information about the main menu legacy feed, I've already checked the inaugural main menu show and, wow! just wow, its all I gotta say. Les give them time to upload everything; I've been listening to main menu since 2007, got introduced to the show by using Alasdair King's WebbIE and accessible programs.
Its good that Debby Hazelton is taking care of this, since I wrote an email to Larry Turnbol back in the day, but didn't got a favorable answer about the archive.