Asterisk is a free telecom software, which runs on Linux based operating systems. It was originally written by an intelligent fellow named Mark Spencer in his garage, in his free time, somewhere in 1999. The world of telecom was never the same after that.
We can divide the telecom eras in two parts. One is pre-Asterisk and one is post-Asterisk. Pre-Asterisk era starts with Alexander Graham Bell’s invention and establishment of the telephone systems in North America, followed by similar achievements by Thomas Edison through his company General Electric. But these inventions very soon became money making business, and evolved as such since then.
Then there came TCP/IP, Ethernet, the Internet, and VoIP.
With the release of Asterisk, a new era started, which enabled everybody with some knowledge of computers, networking and Linux to setup their own telecom infrastructures, at whatever level their expertise would allow. This has changed the world of telecom forever. Now the big guys (telecoms) don’t like to say the world ‘Asterisk’, and a lot of times pretend they even don’t know about it, but they know it very well and it pinches them a lot.
Its not that there was no other VoIP solution before Asterisk, or after it, but the fact is that Asterisk evolved into the best of all, thanks to the effort put into it by a large open source community of technology enthusiasts. Now almost all major VoIP platforms are running Asterisk as their main running engines.
The main website of asterisk is www.asterisk.org. If you want to go into VoIP professionally, learning curve is steep, but not as steep as it was a few years ago. Asterisk website is a good point to start.
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