   digium, inc. is a privately held communications technology company based in huntsville, alabama. digium specializes in developing and manufacturing communications hardware and telephony software, most notably the open-source telephony platform asterisk. ==history== digium was founded by mark spencer in 1999 as linux support services, offering technical support and development services to linux users. while exhibiting the company at linux expo, spencer and keith morgan successfully experimented with receiving a telephone call via vofr using a pc running linux. building on the idea of call processing with pcs, spencer developed software named asterisk to act as a telephone system for the startup company. asterisk was published as open source software, which gave others the freedom to use, change, and improve the software. initially, asterisk solely used frame relay to send and receive calls, but its capabilities quickly expanded, while frame relay reached obsolescence. independently of linux support services or asterisk, jim dixon had begun the zapata telephony project to create computer-telephony interfaces that relied on the strength of a general-purpose cpu rather than specialized dsps. when spencer encountered the zapata telephony project (abbreviated to zaptel), he and dixon collaborated to merge the zaptel linux drivers with the asterisk code. the zaptel softwa
2002_establishments_in_Alabama Asterisk_(PBX) Companies_based_in_Huntsville,_Alabama Companies_established_in_2002 FreePBX Free_software_companies Privately_held_companies_based_in_Alabama