By 1997 Octel's biggest competitors were Audix, made by Lucent, and Meridian Mail, made by Nortel.

Following the settlement with Wang, VMX settled with Octel Communications in exchange for a small payment and Octel's agreeing not to litigate any VMX patent, Octel received a paid-up, royalty-free license on all existing and future VMX patents.

#" Octel Emerges as Rising Star in Voice Messaging Systems ", Peninsula Times Tribune, November 7, 1988, page C-1 ; " Investors Waking Up to Octel's Leadership ", Investor's Daily, February 17, 1989 ; " Octel's Stock Gamble Has Paid Off ", USA Today, Friday, February 24, 1989, page 3B.

" Octel's Robert Cohn: CEO of Voice-Messaging Firm Puts Premium on Speed ", by Kathleen Doler.

Notification methods also vary based on the voice-mail system.

One of the first modern day voice-mail applications was invented by Gerald M. Kolodny and Paul Hughes, which was described in an article in the medical journal, Radiology ( Kolodny GM, Cohen HI, Kalisky A. Rapid-access system for radiology reports: a new concept.

A single voice-mail ® system could handle tens of thousands of calls simultaneously and was designed to meet telecom performance and reliability standards.

ROLM Corporation, founded in 1969 by Gene Richeson, Ken Oshman, Walter Loewenstern and Robert Maxfield, was the first PBX manufacturer to offer integrated voice-mail with its PhoneMail system, its registered trademark.

Opcom, a company founded by David Ladd, developed a voice-mail system primarily marketed to smaller enterprises.

uReach provides VoiceMail services for Verizon and a host of other Tier 1 and Tier 2 carriers and is the voice-mail system used by Verizon FIOS.

Unified Messaging integrated voice-mail into Microsoft Exchange, the corporate email system made by Microsoft.

If someone called the phone number, it never rang on an actual phone, but would be routed immediately to a central voice-mail system.

The voice-mail system answered the call and the caller could leave a long, detailed message.

As soon as the message was received, the voice-mail system would trigger the citizen's pager.

This section describes how the original style, standalone, voice-mail system worked with a corporate PBX.

* A central processor ( CPU ) which runs the operating system and a program ( software ) that gives the system the look-and-feel of a voice-mail system.

The drawing below shows how the voice-mail system interacts with the PBX.

After a certain number of rings, the PBX stops ringing Fred's extension and forwards the call to an extension connected to the voice-mail system ( C ).

Simultaneously the PBX tells the voice-mail system ( through signaling link D ) that the call it is forwarding to voice-mail is for Fred at extension 2345.

In this way, the voice-mail system can answer the call with Fred's greeting.

When Fred's extension forwards to the voice-mail system, the Telephone Interface detects ringing.

All " talking " to the caller is done through prompts that are selected by the CPU according to the program stored in the voice-mail system.

When Fred comes back to his desk and sees the light on his phone, he calls a designated extension number for the voice-mail system ( an actual extension number assigned to the lines in " C " in the figure above ).

This interaction of playing prompts and responding with Touch-tones enables Fred to interact with the voice-mail system easily.

The first voice messaging application, the Speech Filing System ( later renamed Audio Distribution System ( ADS ) was developed at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in 1973 under the leadership of Stephen Boies, who worked on the modern day voice-mail or voice messaging.

Matthews, a prolific entrepreneur and patenter, applied for and was granted a patent on voice-mail ( patent number 4, 371, 752 ) which issued in February, 1983.

The patent was promoted as the pioneering patent for voice-mail.

The patent was never challenged in court and VMX then continued to assert ( incorrectly ) that it had invented voice-mail and that Matthews was the " father of voice-mail ".

In 1979, a voice-mail service company Televoice International was founded in California by Paul Finnigan, Dow Brian and Paula Paige.

The company was subsequently issued a trademark for “ Voice-mail ” and changed its name to Voice-mail ® International ( VMI ). http :// www. uspto. gov search voice-mail, serial # 73275916 Finnigan and Brian had their first experience with voice-mail in 1978 at Microform Medical Systems when they integrated voice technology with the DEC PDP-11 used by their Laboratory Information System, allowing physicians to retrieve patient test results using a touch tone telephone by simply entering the patient's bed number followed by the test code such as " CBC " for Complete Blood Count.

While Octel benefited from the work and experiments of others it was the first stand-alone voice-mail company to build a strong business and strategy to win in this difficult market.

Chiquita denied all the allegations, and sued after it was revealed that Gallagher had repeatedly hacked into Chiquita's voice-mail system.

In May 1980, VMI introduced the first nationwide voice-mail service from its headquarters in Santa Clara, CA using a Digital Equipment PDP 11 with proprietary voice technology called the " Big Talker ". Business Week-Information Processing – August, 1981-page90F.

The challenges included the high cost of voice storage systems, the lack of touch tone telephones, particularly in the international market ; and the complexity of integrating the voice-mail platform with paging systems and corporate computer databases.

Most cell phone services offer voice-mail as a basic feature, many corporate PBXs include versatile internal voice-messaging services and * 98 Vertical service code subscription is available to most individual and small business land line subscribers.

* System disks which not only include the software above, but also contain a complete directory of all users with pertinent data about each ( name, extension number, voice-mail preferences, and pointers to each of the messages stored on the message disk that belong to them );

The show is then handed over to one of the " MuggleCasters ", who goes on to read the listener rebuttals ( MuggleMail ) along with a voice-mail section, in which listeners can send recorded questions to the panel about previous episode discussions and questions about the Harry Potter series in general.

In the early 1980s there were over 30 companies vying for the corporate voice-mail market.

Only a few of these companies were successful in capturing a significant market share and remain in the voice-mail business today.

By 2000, some estimate that there were over 150, 000, 000 active users of corporate and carrier voice-mail made by the Octel Messaging Division.

A ruling by Judge Harold H. Greene on March 7, 1988 removed this barrier and allowed the BOCs to offer voice-mail service, however they were not alloweed to design or manufacture equipment used to provide voice-mail services.