Page 15 - Asterisk™: The Future of Telephony

that no one person or company could have possibly created it on its own. In making
Asterisk possible, I particularly would like to thank Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman,
the entire Asterisk community, and whoever invented Red Bull.
So where is Asterisk going from here? Think about the history of the PC. When it was
first introduced in 1980, it had fairly limited capabilities. Maybe you could do a spread-
sheet, maybe do some word processing, but in the end, not much. Over time, however,
its open architecture led to price reductions and new products allowing it to slowly
expand its applications, eventually displacing the mini computer, then the mainframe.
Now, even Cray supercomputers are built using Linux-based x86 architectures. I an-
ticipate that Asterisk’s future will look very similar. Today, there is a large subset of
telephony that is served by Asterisk. Tomorrow, who knows what the limit might be?
So, what are you waiting for? Read, learn, and participate in the future of open tele-
communications by joining the Asterisk revolution!
—Mark Spencer

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