The Micom V/IP Voice over IP Product
Or How I got to be one of the Pioneers of VOIP
At the end of 1994 I got recruited by Micom. Micom was a Southern California company, and I didn't want to leave Petaluma, but when I told them I knew a group of guys that could help them they decided to hire us as consultants.
They got us a nice little office right next door to Lagunitas Brewery (which was nice back
in the day of the Thursday night door rollup parties). This turned out that Micom getting us office space was an added bonus because they had to hire us as temporary employees at contractor rates.
So we sat down and designed an ISA card with Micom's DSP processor on it. Designed a flow for the software, a calling protocol, a protocol for packing the voice packets over UDP with Forward Error Control (basically just resending the short term predictors for G.729 in the next packet.) Created a RTOS for the standalone DOS software, a Netware text UI windowing system compatibility layer so the software would operate the same in the Netware and DOS environment. Glued it all together and we had a working
successful product.
The great thing about this project is that we had a lot done really fast. We used the prototype V/IP boards to communicate to Micom Central via our 56Kbps Frame Relay link. It worked surprisingly well right off the bat.
This was one of the first, if not the first "real" Voice over IP product. We generated two patents on the system that were
fundamental VOIP patents.
Micom and later Northern Telecom sold many of these boards. As far as I know they were sold until about 2002.
Patent Links
System and method for transmitting aural information between a computer and telephone equipment Patent ##5940479 - Written in 1995.
System and method for reliability transporting aural information across a network Patent #6298057 - The work on this patent was done in 1995.
Local Info
Dos and Netware Manual This was the first software developed by our team.
Win95 Manual This was under development when I left. Mostly a So Cal job.
Related Links
France Telecom North America implements MICOM's V/IP gateway at three U.S. locations
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