I, Libertine was a literary hoax novel that began as a practical joke by late-night radio raconteur Jean Shepherd. Shepherd was highly annoyed at the way that the bestseller lists were being compiled in the mid-1950s. These lists were determined not only from sales figures but also from the number of requests for new and upcoming books at bookstores. Shepherd urged his listeners to enter bookstores and ask for a book that did not exist. He fabricated the author (Frederick R. Ewing) of this imaginary novel, concocted a title (I, Libertine), and outlined a basic plot for his listeners to use on skeptical or confused bookstore clerks. Fans of the show eventually took it further, planting references to the book and author so widely that demand for the book led to it being listed on The New York Times Best Seller list.
Jim Dude and the Asterisk software – he is in a wheel chair
Just got off of the phone with Jim Dude. He is quite a character and I will be talking to him more. Sold a microcontroller board to him as I was moving out of Saint Louis.
Asterisk was a functional concept, but had no real way of becoming a practical useful thing, since it didnt, at that time, have a concept of being able to talk directly (or very well indirectly for that matter, being that there wasnt much, if any, in the way of practical VOIP hardware available) to any Telecom hardware (phones, lines, etc). Its marriage with the Zapata Telephony system concept and hardware/driver/ library design and interface allowed it to grow to be a real switch, that could talk to real telephones, lines, etc.
