That Vocoder Voice
Was Colossus's synthesizer voice the inspiration for the Cylons' synthesizer voice in the original BSG?
Or had it become so common by the late '70s as to weaken any would-be link?
There was no such thing as Vocoders in 1970. Probably just a lot of reverb and other clipping effects from the sound dept.
There were Moogs; it's possible they ran the voice signal through a sine wave/saw wave. Or even a fuzz guitar pedal. You really had to be an inventive engineer, with a vivid imagination to experiment back then.
Not much was pushbutton, you had to invent stuff out of what was around.
Like the Star Wars gun sounds. They clipped a mike onto one of those cables that holding up a telephone pole, smack the cable with something, and record it onto a portable reel-to-reel tape recorder. Pwew! Pwew!
Now listen here, you mugs, nobody gets to say 'Meh' anymore unless you're Edward G. Robinson, see?
Vocoders did exist in 1970. They were originally developed in the 1930s as a means of reducing the bandwidth of speech. Google "bell voder", and you'll find a Youtube clip of a demonstration of electronic speech from 1939.
Dr Who's Daleks, from the early 1960s, used ring modulators to produce electronic vocalisations and that was on a shoestring budget. Colossus was more expensive. I assume the vocoder was a special one-off.
Wendy Carlos actually saw the film when it was new, and was directly inspired by it to have a custom vocoder developed for the Clockwork Orange soundtrack - which helped make vocoders popular and more importantly affordable, and so I imagine in a round-about way you can draw a line from Colossus to Battlestar: Galactica.
Bidi Bidi Bidi, okie-dokey, Bidi Bidi.
I prefer the toad less raveled