System information

Finally, and most importantly, thanks go to Mark Spencer, the original author of
Asterisk and founder of Digium, for Asterisk, for Pidgin (http://www.pidgin.im), and
for contributing his creations to the open source community. Asterisk is your legacy!
Leif Madsen
It sort of amazes me where I started with Asterisk, and where I’ve gone with Asterisk.
In 2002, while attending school, a bunch of my friends and myself were experimenting
with voice over the Internet using Microsoft’s MSN product. It worked quite well, and
allowed us to play video games while conversing with each other—at least, until we
wanted to add a third participant. So, I went out searching for some software that could
handle multiple voices (the word was conferencing, but I didn’t even know that at the
time, having had little exposure to PBX platforms). I searched the Internet but didn’t
find anything in particular I liked (or that was free). I turned to IRC and explained what
I was looking for. Someone (I wish I knew who) mentioned that I should check out
some software called Asterisk (he presumably must have thought I was looking for
MeetMe(), which I was).
Having the name, I grabbed the software and started looking at what it could do. In-
credibly, the functionality I was looking for, which I thought would be the entirety of
the software, was only one component in a sea of functionality. And having run a BBS
for years prior to going to college, the fact that I could install a PCI card and connect
it to the phone network was not lost on me. After a couple of hours of looking at the
software and getting it compiled, I started telling one of my teachers about the PCI
cards and how maybe we could get some for the classroom for labs and such (our
classroom had 30 computers at 10 tables of 3). He liked the idea and started talking to
the program coordinator, and within about 30 minutes an order had been placed for
20 cards. Pretty amazing considering they were TDM400Ps decked out with four
daughter cards, and they had only heard about them an hour prior to that.
Then the obsession began. I spent every extra moment of that semester with a couple
of computers dedicated to Asterisk use. In those two months, I learned a lot. Then we
had a co-op break. I didn’t find any work immediately, so I moved home and continued
working on Asterisk, spending time on IRC, reading through examples posted by John
Todd, and just trying to wrap my head around how the software worked. Luckily I had
a lot of help on IRC (for these were the days prior to any documentation on Asterisk),
and I learned a lot more during that semester.
Seeing that the people who took a great interest in Asterisk at the time had a strong
sense of community and wanted to contribute back, I wanted to do the same. Having
no practical level of coding knowledge, I decided documentation would be something
useful to start doing. Besides, I had been writing a lot of papers at school, so I was
getting better at it. One night I put up a website called The Asterisk Documentation
Assigned (TADA) and started writing down any documentation I could. A couple of
weeks later Jared Smith and I started talking, and started the Asterisk Documentation
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