Speak Freely History
A brief history of Speak Freely
RASCAL
Back in 1989, Brian C. Wiles had an idea to create a software product that would allow PC gamers to talk to their opponents while playing video games against each other over their dialup modems. His idea was called
RASCAL which was short for Remote Audio Sound Card Application Link. He began to develop it and by the end of 1989 was sending voice over Ethernet networks using the KA9Q Network Operating System. Technically,
RASCAL was the first Voice over IP application. Earlier experiments with voice over packet networks were done in the 1970's, but they were done over other protocols, not the Internet Protocol or IP. Brian hadn't heard about the earlier experiments and had to come up with his solution entirely on his own. (Google and even the web didn't exist yet.)
At the time, audio compression was in its infancy, and there wasn't yet a way to get the voice packets small enough to be sent over the slow dialup modems of the day. So, Brian was able to use RASCAL to send his voice over
Ethernet, but his dream of multiplayer shoot-em-up games with opponents actually talking to each other would have to wait.
NetFone Is Born
When John Walker, founder of Autodesk, moved to Europe in May of 1991 to help organize
Autodesk's European Software Centre, he realized that one
thing he'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, John decided to see if he
could put the pieces together so he could talk and/or
broadcast meetings over the leased line. Since raw
Sun mu-law audio requires 64 Kb and he only had 56 Kb
to work with, John hammered in a decimation/expansion scheme
to reduce the bandwidth to 32 Kb. (It remains today, in
a more refined form, as "Simple compression".) John knew
very little about audio encoding at the time--obviously
ADPCM would have been a far better choice, but he was
ignorant of it and was not sure a public domain implementation
of it existed in 1991. John 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; John 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.
NetFone Development Continues
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.
John didn't really get back into development mode until
the summer of 1995, when he discovered the public
domain implementation of GSM which is still used in
Speak Freely. This, along with Phil Karn's DES (which
he 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.
Collaboration Begins
When Brian heard of John's efforts on NetFone, he became intrigued
and realized that someone else had answered the question of how to
get voice over modems working. The two developers began to share ideas and collaborate
on NetFone from then on. Eventually, some pieces of RASCAL were incorporated into
NetFone, but eventually, the original RASCAL source code was lost to a hard drive
crash.
NetFone release 5 followed on August 28, 1995 and added
IDEA encryption as well as fixes to features in release 4.
NetFone Becomes Speak Freely
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)
with its initial release on August 23, 1995. Since then,
we continued to add features and continue to do so to this day.
Last Modified: June 26, 1999 by Brian C. Wiles