Speak Freely History
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`Speak Freely History
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`Library Mgmt Software
`
`An ILS Solely for Public Libraries 6th Year at the Top of the Charts
`
`A brief history of Speak Freely:
`
`When I moved to Europe in May of 1991 to help organise
`Autodesk's European Software Centre, I realised that one
`thing I'd miss is being able to listen in on design
`meetings and talk with individual developers without
`running up huge phone bills. Autodesk had a dedicated
`56 Kb leased line between headquarters in California and
`the European Software Centre which was used primarily
`for transmitting software updates but which was nearly
`idle in the overlap hours between Europe and California.
`Since all of our software developers had Sun workstations
`which came with audio hardware, I decided to see if I
`could put the pieces together so we could talk and/or
`broadcast meetings over the leased line. Since raw
`Sun mu-law audio requires 64 Kb and I only had 56 Kb
`to work with, I hammered in a decimation/expansion scheme
`to reduce the bandwidth to 32 Kb. (It remains today, in
`a more refined form, as "Simple compression".) I knew
`very little about audio encoding at the time--obviously
`ADPCM would have been a far better choice, but I was
`ignorant of it and I'm not sure a public domain implementation
`of it existed in 1991. I first experimented with an RPC
`implementation which worked fine over a LAN but was
`hopeless over the leased line, which was routed over a
`satellite link and had high latency; I finally settled
`on UDP as the only viable protocol, a decision
`independently reached by the designers of RTP years
`later.
`
`Anyway, the first release of what was then called
`NetFone was posted on July 11, 1991. Release 2 was
`posted on September 12, 1991 and consisted of cleanups
`and bug fixes.
`
`That's where things stood until Release 3 on December
`13, 1994, which corrected some compiler warnings on
`the ANSI compiler which replaced Sun's original K&R
`cc.
`
`I didn't really get back into development mode until
`the summer of 1995, when I discovered the public
`domain implementation of GSM which is still used in
`Speak Freely. This, along with Phil Karn's DES (which
`I had used in a number of other programs over the
`years), and the Silicon Graphics audio drivers supplied
`by Paul Schurman made up NetFone release 4, posted on
`August 2, 1995. This was the first version able to
`run on a typical Internet connection as opposed to a
`leased line, albeit still limited to Sun and Silicon
`Graphics workstations.
`
`NetFone release 5 followed on August 28, 1995 and added
`IDEA encryption as well as fixes to features in release 4.
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`http://www.speakfreely.org/history.html
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`6/21/2016
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`Ex. 1018
`YMax Corporation
`Page 1 of 2
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`Speak Freely History
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`Netfone 5.1 was released on September 2, 1995, and
`was the first to include the log.doc file. The program
`was renamed Speak Freely as of release 5.2 on
`September 21, 1995 and all subsequent development is
`documented in the log.
`
`The Windows version began as a port of NetFone 5 (aka 5.0)
`and all development following its initial release on
`August 23, 1995 is described in the Windows development
`log.
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`Last Modified: June 26, 1999 by Brian C. Wiles
`
`http://www.speakfreely.org/history.html
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`6/21/2016
`
`Ex. 1018
`YMax Corporation
`Page 2 of 2