System information

but it seemed unlikely that anyone was ever going to. At that point it was clear that if
he wanted a revolution, he was going to have to start it himself. And so the Zapata
Telephony Project was born:
Since this concept was so revolutionary, and was certain to make a lot of waves in the
industry, I decided on the Mexican revolutionary motif, and named the technology and
organization after the famous Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata. I decided to call
the card the “tormenta” which, in Spanish, means “storm,” but contextually is usually
used to imply a big storm, like a hurricane or such.
†
Perhaps we should be calling ourselves Asteristas. Regardless, we owe Jim Dixon a debt
of thanks, partly for thinking this up and partly for seeing it through, but mostly for
giving the results of his efforts to the open source community. As a result of Jim’s
contribution, Asterisk’s PSTN engine came to be.
Over the years, the Zapata Telephony interface in Asterisk has been modified and im-
proved. The Digium Asterisk Hardware Device Interface (DAHDI) Telephony interface
in use today is the offspring of Jim Dixon’s contribution.
Massive Change Requires Flexible Technology
Every PBX in existence suffers from shortcomings. No matter how fully featured it is,
something will always be left out, because even the most feature-rich PBX will always
fail to anticipate the creativity of the customer. A small group of users will desire an
odd little feature that the design team either did not think of or could not justify the
cost of building, and, since the system is closed, the users will not be able to build it
themselves.
If the Internet had been thusly hampered by regulation and commercial interests, it is
doubtful that it would have developed the wide acceptance it currently enjoys. The
openness of the Internet meant that anyone could afford to get involved. So, everyone
did. The tens of thousands of minds that collaborated on the creation of the Internet
delivered something that no corporation ever could have.
‡
As with many other open source projects, such as Linux and so much of the critical
software running the Internet, the development of Asterisk was fueled by the dreams
of folks who knew that there had to be something more than what traditional industries
were producing. These people knew that if one could take the best parts of various
PBXs and separate them into interconnecting components—akin to a boxful of LEGO
bricks—one could begin to conceive of things that would not survive a traditional
† Jim Dixon, “The History of Zapata Telephony and How It Relates to the Asterisk PBX” (http://www
.asteriskdocs.org/modules/tinycontent/index.php?id=10).
‡ We realize that the technology of the Internet formed out of government and academic institutions, but what
we’re talking about here is not the technology of the Internet so much as the cultural phenomenon of it,
which exploded in the early ’90s.
Massive Change Requires Flexible Technology | 3