Look Who's Talking Now by Scott D. Koegler Computers have been talking with and through telephone systems for years now, if only via serial ports and modems. Sophisticated applications for telemarketing call centers have long combined computers and telephones to produce integrated environments. For starters, the kinds of integrated systems that delivered calls to the right telemarketing rep when you phoned in your order for Ginsu knives were highly proprietary. Like other mainframe computing models, proprietary systems are giving way to standards-based open systems.
Open systems invite ingenuity, competition and collaboration.
This opening of the telephone closet has sparked increased activity in the telephone, computer hardware and software markets. Previously complex and expensive applications are moving toward commodity status. Not all of these differences are technical. TAPI is available now for Windows 3.1 and 3.11 and will be included with Windows95. Availability in the OS alone makes TAPI a pervasive force in desktop computing.