Hayes Microcomputer Products
Encyclopedia
Hayes Microcomputer Products was a U.S.
-based manufacturer of modem
s. They are particularly well known for their Smartmodem, which is introduced the ability to control the modem through commands sent in the data stream itself. The "smart modem" approach dramatically simplified operation, making modems a practical device for a much wider audience. Today almost all modems still use a variant of the Hayes command set
introduced in the Smartmodem.
Dennis C. Hayes
left the Georgia Institute of Technology
in the mid-1970s to work at an early data communications company, National Data Corp, a company that handled electronic money transfers and credit card authorizations. Hayes' job was to set up modem connections for NDC's customers.
At the time, modems generally came in two "flavors", one for the end-user that required the user to dial the phone manually and use an acoustic coupler
for connection, and another dedicated to answering incoming calls that was intended for use on the minicomputer
or mainframe
the user was calling. No single modem offered all of these features, at least not at a price-point that would be attractive to non-business users.
Hayes was a computer hobbyist, and felt that modems would be highly compelling to users of what would soon be known as home computer
s. However, existing modems were simply too expensive and difficult to use to be practical for most users. What was needed was a single modem that could "do it all"; connect directly to the phone, answer incoming calls, dial numbers to initiate outgoing calls and hang up when the call was complete.
The main problem with producing such a modem was forwarding commands from the computer. This could be addressed in internal modems that plugged directly into the computer's motherboard
. Such modems had access to the computer's main memory, and by dedicating certain memory locations (or registers) to various status readouts or commands, software programs running on the computer could control the modem. This was a straightforward and thus a popular solution; the Novation APPLE-CAT II
for the Apple II
computer was an early programmable modem of this type.
Hayes started producing similar products at a "hobby level" in his kitchen in April 1977 with his friend and co-worker, Dale Heatherington. Their first product was the 80-103A, a 300 bit/s Bell 103-compatible design for S-100 bus
machines. Business picked up quickly, and in January 1978 they quit their jobs at National Data to form their own company, D.C. Hayes Associates.
Sales were further improved in early 1979 with the introduction of the 300 bit/s Micromodem 100 for S-100 bus computers and the Micromodem II for the Apple II that used an external "microcoupler" to connect to telephone lines. In 1980 the company changed its name to Hayes Microcomputer Products, under which it operated for most of its history.
, including Apple II, S-100, TRS-80
, and others. Some popular computers, like the Atari 400, did not even integrate internal slots. An obvious solution was to use the RS-232
serial port; modems were serial devices and generally driven off RS-232 anyway, and most computer designs included an RS-232 port, or some variant.
Hayes and the company's marketing manager Glenn Sirkis approached Heatherington with an outline for a new command-driven external modem. A few external modems already offered the ability to dial the phone by entering a phone number when the modem was first started, but the real problem was somehow sending a command to hang up, while the modem was already connected. There needed to be some way to indicate that the characters flowing out from the computer to the modem were not simply additional data to be sent to the far end, but commands to be acted on.
Several solutions to the problem were studied, and in the end Heatherington decided the only practical one was to have the modem operate in two modes. In one, data mode, all data forwarded from the computer was modulated and sent over the connected telephone line as it was with any other modem. In the other, command mode, data forwarded from the computer was instead interpreted as commands. In this way, the modem could be instructed by the computer to perform various operations, such as hang up the phone or dial a number. The modem would normally start up in command mode.
The problem was how to move from mode to mode. One option would be to signal this change — "put yourself into command mode" — via one of the many pins in the RS-232 cable. However, while the 25-pin connector on the modem side had more than enough pins for this purpose (even some meant for this purpose), the computer side often used a much smaller 9-pin connector, and equally often many of these pins weren't actually connected or accessible from software. In fact, there were very few pins that were guaranteed to work on all computers, mostly the data in and out, "ready" indications that said whether the modem or computer was operational, and sometimes flow-control pins.
While it would have been possible to use some of these pins for the sort of command-switching they needed (the "ready" indications, for example, would have sufficed) Heatherington instead came up with the idea of using a rarely-seen sequence of characters for this duty. Since these characters could be sent to the modem using the same two data pins that the port would need anyway, they could be sure that such a system would work on every computer.
The sequence he decided on was +++ (three plus signs). When this was received from the computer, the modem would switch from data to command mode. Of course it was entirely possible that the computer would send this sequence for other reasons, for example, the sequence might be contained within a text file describing how modems worked. In order to filter out these "accidental" sequences, Heatherington's design only switched to command mode if the sequence was led and followed by a one-second pause, the guard time, in which no other data was sent. In this case it could be safely assumed that the sequence was being sent deliberately by a user, as opposed to being buried in the middle of a stream of data.
With the basic idea outlined, Hayes and Sirkis gave Heatherington the go-ahead to build a prototype by adding a microcontroller
to an otherwise lightly modified version of their existing 300 bit/s hardware. Sirkis was particularly interested in using the 1 MHz PIC microcontroller
, which were available for only US$1 a piece. After six months of trying to get the modem working with the PIC, Heatherington gave up and demanded they use the 8 MHz Zilog Z8
instead, a US$10 part. Sirkis acquiesced, and a working prototype was soon complete.
Hayes added a requirement of his own, that the modem be able to automatically detect what speed the computer's serial port was set to when first powered on. This was not simple unless the modem "knew" what data was initially being sent, allowing it to time the bit
s and thereby guess the speed. Heatherington eventually suggested the use of a well-known character sequence for this purpose, recommending AT for "attention", which is prefixed on all commands.
The new design, housed in an extruded
aluminum case sized to allow a standard desktop telephone
to rest on top, was released in July 1981. It was known simply as the Smartmodem. The Smartmodem was the first modem integrating complete control over the phone line, and that allowed it to be used in exactly the same fashion with any computer.
Hayes originally had big plans for the form factor, referring to it as the Hayes Stack and intending to release a range of products that could be stacked beside the computer. In the end, only two non-modem devices were added to the line. The Hayes Stack Chronograph, an external real-time clock and the Transet 1000, a printer buffer and primitive email box. Both of these items' sales were apparently dismal. Early advertising referred to the Smartmodem as the "Hayes Stack Smartmodem", but this naming convention was dropped a short time later.
At the time of its introduction, the modem market was fairly small, and competitors generally ignored the Smartmodem. But it was not long before hobbyists were able to combine the Smartmodem with new software to create the first real bulletin board system
s (BBSes), which created significant market demand. The market grew rapidly in the mid-1980s, and as the Smartmodem was the only truly "universal" modem on the market, Hayes grew to take over much of the market. Heatherington retired from what was then a large company in 1984.
As the modem market expanded, competitors quickly copied the Hayes command set
and often the Hayes industrial design as well. But in order to compete with Hayes on price, early competitors manufactured modems using low-cost components that were often unreliable. Hayes quickly gained a reputation for high quality, and for a period of time held a 50% market share.
Also differentiating Hayes from its competition was the Smartmodem's use of the guard time. Hayes had patented this concept in 1985 in patent #4,549,302, the Modem With Improved Escape Sequence With Guard Time Mechanism, generally referred to as the "Hayes '302 patent". Hayes licensed the guard time to other manufacturers for $1 a modem – a charge which competitors derisively termed the "modem tax". A number of manufacturers banded together and introduced the Time Independent Escape Sequence
, or TIES, but it was not as robust as Heatherington's system and never became very successful.
In 1982, at the Spring Comdex in Atlantic City, Hayes introduced the Bell 212
-compatible Smartmodem 1200 for $699, the first practical all-in-one 1200 bit/s Bell 212-compatible modem. The earlier design was redesignated the Smartmodem 300. At the time, Hayes was one of the few modem companies with the capital and engineering wherewithal to develop entirely new modem architectures. However, this was only a limited competitive advantage, since it was not long before companies offering Hayes "clones" introduced derivative 1200 bit/s models of their own.
The 1200 bit/s market existed for a relatively short time; in 1984 the CCITT introduced the v.22bis standard for 2400 bit/s operation. This was the first time that the CCITT's standard predated Bell's introductions, avoiding compatibility issues that had plagued earlier standards. Modem companies quickly incorporated v.22bis into their product lines. Hayes was no exception; the company introduced its v.22bis Smartmodem 2400 at US$549 in 1985 (the 1200 bit/s Smartmodem also remained available at a lower price point). Competition drove prices rapidly downward, and by 1987 a clone 2400 bit/s modem was generally available for around US$250. After 1987, modems increasingly became a commodity item.
(USR) and Telebit
to meet market demand with faster products. In 1987 Hayes responded with the 9600 bit/s "Ping-Pong" protocol, which was later renamed "Express 96". The name referred to the way the modems could "ping-pong" the single high-speed link between the two ends on demand, in a fashion similar to the USR and Telebit protocols. However, the Express 96 both was late to market and lacked error correction, making it far less attractive than its competition. The design was generally unsuccessful, and for the first time Hayes lost cachet as the leader in modem design and manufacture.
Hayes's slow entry into the high-speed market led to a fracturing of the command set. In order to set up the modem to accept or reject certain types of connections, Hayes had added a number of new commands prefixed by & (the ampersand) to the Smartmodem 2400. When they moved to the Smartmodem 9600, they simply extended the set further, using the same syntax. The other companies involved all used their own syntax; USR used an incompatible set of &-prefixed commands, Microcom
used \, and Telebit was based on setting a series of registers. All of these survived for some time into the early 1990s.
Through the late 1980s and early 1990s, new standard high-speed modes were introduced by the CCITT. The first of these, v.32, offered 9600 bit/s in both directions at the same time, whereas earlier high-speed protocols were high-speed in one direction only. In 1988 Hayes effectively abandoned their Express 96 protocol in favor of v.32, which along with MNP
support was built into the 1199 USD Hayes V-series Smartmodem 9600. In 1990 the company introduced the Smartmodem Ultra 96 which offered both v.32 and Express 96 support, and added the new v.42bis error correction and compression system (in addition to MNP). v.32 modems remained fairly rare and expensive, although by 1990 third-party v.32 modems were available for approximately 600 USD.
introduced a low-cost chipset
supporting the new 14,400 bit/s v.32bis standard, along with similar v.32 and v.22bis (2400 bit/s) versions, all of which supported MNP, v.42bis and, optionally, 9600 bit/s v.29 fax
modem capabilities. Their system was introduced commercially in the SupraFAXModem 14400
, which went on to become a runaway bestseller. Soon there were literally hundreds of similar models on the market, and Rockwell's competitors also rushed in with similar chipsets of their own.
Hayes was never able to re-establish itself as a market leader through this era. They quickly introduced their own v.32bis model in the fall of 1991, the US$799 Smartmodem Ultra 144, but this point Express 96 had little cachet, and the market was already flooded with lower-cost modems. They then split their line into the Accura and Optima brands, offering the Accura as a low-cost model, although the feature sets were not that different between the two lines. Hayes eventually purchased two of their competitors, Practical Peripherals and Cardinal, turning them into low-cost brands in order to compete with companies such as Zoom Telephonics.
As speeds increased with the introduction of v.34 and v.90, Hayes increasingly became a follower rather than a leader. By the mid-1990s their modems were also based on the Rockwell chip set, and had little to distinguish themselves from other vendors.
Oddly it was the Rockwell chip set that also re-standardized the various command sets back on the original high-speed ones introduced by Hayes. As the Rockwell-based systems became more and more common, other companies, like AT&T, introduced new versions of their modem chip sets with identical commands. Rockwell had taken their commands from the V-series Smartmodems, so by the mid-90s the market was once again based largely on a "real" Hayes command set.
However, ISDN simply never happened. The whole model was based on end-to-end digital communications, and was thus limited to the speed of the long-distance carrier lines, either 56 or 64 kbit/s. The Bell companies were interested in deploying ISDN, but doing so required customer-end installations to make their conventional telephones work, which made the system unattractive for wide-scale deployment.
Additionally, the rise of the Internet
in the mid-1990s made point-to-point communications far less interesting. After dialing their local Internet service provider
, the user could "call out" at high speed to services around the world, so the need for long-distance data calls was generally eliminated. As a result of this shift, there was no real need to limit the user to the speed of the long-distance lines, giving the Bell companies flexibility in terms of what to install at the user's site. Their attention turned to ADSL, which ran over the existing wiring and did not use up a phone line in the process. The end-user was offered much higher speeds while still being able to use their existing phones, with the added "benefit" of helping tie the user to the telephone company's own ISP.
Hayes, having bet the company on a system that was never actually deployed, had no new products in the pipeline. An effort was started to move into the market for ADSL and cable modem
s, but this was a multi-year effort during a period when USR increasingly took over the market. They entered Chapter 11 protection in November 1994, exiting in October 1995 as Hayes Corp. after selling 49% of the company to Nortel
and a Singapore
-based venture capital
firm. In 1997 they merged with Access Beyond, a builder of ISP rack-mount modems and terminal server
s, and changed the company name again, this time to Hayes Communications. The merger was primarily a way to take the company public. The stock started crashing over the next year, from around US$12 in early 1998 to pennies in October, when they once again filed for Chapter 11 protection. No new funding could be found, and in 1999 the company assets were liquidated.
The brand name was purchased and revived by onetime rival Zoom Technologies
in July 1999. Zoom continues to use the Hayes name on some of their products.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
-based manufacturer of modem
Modem
A modem is a device that modulates an analog carrier signal to encode digital information, and also demodulates such a carrier signal to decode the transmitted information. The goal is to produce a signal that can be transmitted easily and decoded to reproduce the original digital data...
s. They are particularly well known for their Smartmodem, which is introduced the ability to control the modem through commands sent in the data stream itself. The "smart modem" approach dramatically simplified operation, making modems a practical device for a much wider audience. Today almost all modems still use a variant of the Hayes command set
Hayes command set
The Hayes command set is a specific command-language originally developed for the Hayes Smartmodem 300 baud modem in 1981. The command set consists of a series of short text strings which combine together to produce complete commands for operations such as dialing, hanging up, and changing the...
introduced in the Smartmodem.
Early history
Dennis Hayes
Dennis Hayes was the founder of Hayes Microcomputer Products, a maker of modems mostly known for introducing the Hayes command set which has subsequently been used in most modems produced to this day....
left the Georgia Institute of Technology
Georgia Institute of Technology
The Georgia Institute of Technology is a public research university in Atlanta, Georgia, in the United States...
in the mid-1970s to work at an early data communications company, National Data Corp, a company that handled electronic money transfers and credit card authorizations. Hayes' job was to set up modem connections for NDC's customers.
At the time, modems generally came in two "flavors", one for the end-user that required the user to dial the phone manually and use an acoustic coupler
Acoustic coupler
In telecommunications, the term acoustic coupler has the following meanings:# An interface device for coupling electrical signals by acoustical means—usually into and out of a telephone instrument....
for connection, and another dedicated to answering incoming calls that was intended for use on the minicomputer
Minicomputer
A minicomputer is a class of multi-user computers that lies in the middle range of the computing spectrum, in between the largest multi-user systems and the smallest single-user systems...
or mainframe
Mainframe computer
Mainframes are powerful computers used primarily by corporate and governmental organizations for critical applications, bulk data processing such as census, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise resource planning, and financial transaction processing.The term originally referred to the...
the user was calling. No single modem offered all of these features, at least not at a price-point that would be attractive to non-business users.
Hayes was a computer hobbyist, and felt that modems would be highly compelling to users of what would soon be known as home computer
Home computer
Home computers were a class of microcomputers entering the market in 1977, and becoming increasingly common during the 1980s. They were marketed to consumers as affordable and accessible computers that, for the first time, were intended for the use of a single nontechnical user...
s. However, existing modems were simply too expensive and difficult to use to be practical for most users. What was needed was a single modem that could "do it all"; connect directly to the phone, answer incoming calls, dial numbers to initiate outgoing calls and hang up when the call was complete.
The main problem with producing such a modem was forwarding commands from the computer. This could be addressed in internal modems that plugged directly into the computer's motherboard
Motherboard
In personal computers, a motherboard is the central printed circuit board in many modern computers and holds many of the crucial components of the system, providing connectors for other peripherals. The motherboard is sometimes alternatively known as the mainboard, system board, or, on Apple...
. Such modems had access to the computer's main memory, and by dedicating certain memory locations (or registers) to various status readouts or commands, software programs running on the computer could control the modem. This was a straightforward and thus a popular solution; the Novation APPLE-CAT II
Novation CAT
Novation was an early modem manufacturer whose CAT series were popular in the early home computer market in the late 1970s and early 1980s, notably on the Apple II...
for the Apple II
Apple II
The Apple II is an 8-bit home computer, one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputer products, designed primarily by Steve Wozniak, manufactured by Apple Computer and introduced in 1977...
computer was an early programmable modem of this type.
Hayes started producing similar products at a "hobby level" in his kitchen in April 1977 with his friend and co-worker, Dale Heatherington. Their first product was the 80-103A, a 300 bit/s Bell 103-compatible design for S-100 bus
S-100 bus
The S-100 bus or Altair bus, IEEE696-1983 , was an early computer bus designed in 1974 as a part of the Altair 8800, generally considered today to be the first personal computer...
machines. Business picked up quickly, and in January 1978 they quit their jobs at National Data to form their own company, D.C. Hayes Associates.
Sales were further improved in early 1979 with the introduction of the 300 bit/s Micromodem 100 for S-100 bus computers and the Micromodem II for the Apple II that used an external "microcoupler" to connect to telephone lines. In 1980 the company changed its name to Hayes Microcomputer Products, under which it operated for most of its history.
The Smartmodem
Although powerful, the internal modem was commercially impractical. Not only did it require special driver software, but a different hardware design was needed for every computer busComputer bus
In computer architecture, a bus is a subsystem that transfers data between components inside a computer, or between computers.Early computer buses were literally parallel electrical wires with multiple connections, but the term is now used for any physical arrangement that provides the same...
, including Apple II, S-100, TRS-80
TRS-80
TRS-80 was Tandy Corporation's desktop microcomputer model line, sold through Tandy's Radio Shack stores in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The first units, ordered unseen, were delivered in November 1977, and rolled out to the stores the third week of December. The line won popularity with...
, and others. Some popular computers, like the Atari 400, did not even integrate internal slots. An obvious solution was to use the RS-232
RS-232
In telecommunications, RS-232 is the traditional name for a series of standards for serial binary single-ended data and control signals connecting between a DTE and a DCE . It is commonly used in computer serial ports...
serial port; modems were serial devices and generally driven off RS-232 anyway, and most computer designs included an RS-232 port, or some variant.
Hayes and the company's marketing manager Glenn Sirkis approached Heatherington with an outline for a new command-driven external modem. A few external modems already offered the ability to dial the phone by entering a phone number when the modem was first started, but the real problem was somehow sending a command to hang up, while the modem was already connected. There needed to be some way to indicate that the characters flowing out from the computer to the modem were not simply additional data to be sent to the far end, but commands to be acted on.
Several solutions to the problem were studied, and in the end Heatherington decided the only practical one was to have the modem operate in two modes. In one, data mode, all data forwarded from the computer was modulated and sent over the connected telephone line as it was with any other modem. In the other, command mode, data forwarded from the computer was instead interpreted as commands. In this way, the modem could be instructed by the computer to perform various operations, such as hang up the phone or dial a number. The modem would normally start up in command mode.
The problem was how to move from mode to mode. One option would be to signal this change — "put yourself into command mode" — via one of the many pins in the RS-232 cable. However, while the 25-pin connector on the modem side had more than enough pins for this purpose (even some meant for this purpose), the computer side often used a much smaller 9-pin connector, and equally often many of these pins weren't actually connected or accessible from software. In fact, there were very few pins that were guaranteed to work on all computers, mostly the data in and out, "ready" indications that said whether the modem or computer was operational, and sometimes flow-control pins.
While it would have been possible to use some of these pins for the sort of command-switching they needed (the "ready" indications, for example, would have sufficed) Heatherington instead came up with the idea of using a rarely-seen sequence of characters for this duty. Since these characters could be sent to the modem using the same two data pins that the port would need anyway, they could be sure that such a system would work on every computer.
The sequence he decided on was +++ (three plus signs). When this was received from the computer, the modem would switch from data to command mode. Of course it was entirely possible that the computer would send this sequence for other reasons, for example, the sequence might be contained within a text file describing how modems worked. In order to filter out these "accidental" sequences, Heatherington's design only switched to command mode if the sequence was led and followed by a one-second pause, the guard time, in which no other data was sent. In this case it could be safely assumed that the sequence was being sent deliberately by a user, as opposed to being buried in the middle of a stream of data.
With the basic idea outlined, Hayes and Sirkis gave Heatherington the go-ahead to build a prototype by adding a microcontroller
Microcontroller
A microcontroller is a small computer on a single integrated circuit containing a processor core, memory, and programmable input/output peripherals. Program memory in the form of NOR flash or OTP ROM is also often included on chip, as well as a typically small amount of RAM...
to an otherwise lightly modified version of their existing 300 bit/s hardware. Sirkis was particularly interested in using the 1 MHz PIC microcontroller
PIC microcontroller
PIC is a family of Harvard architecture microcontrollers made by Microchip Technology, derived from the PIC1650 originally developed by General Instrument's Microelectronics Division...
, which were available for only US$1 a piece. After six months of trying to get the modem working with the PIC, Heatherington gave up and demanded they use the 8 MHz Zilog Z8
Zilog Z8
The Zilog Z8 is a microcontroller architecture, originally introduced in 1979, which today also includes the eZ8 Encore!, eZ8 Encore! XP, and eZ8 Encore! MC families....
instead, a US$10 part. Sirkis acquiesced, and a working prototype was soon complete.
Hayes added a requirement of his own, that the modem be able to automatically detect what speed the computer's serial port was set to when first powered on. This was not simple unless the modem "knew" what data was initially being sent, allowing it to time the bit
Bit
A bit is the basic unit of information in computing and telecommunications; it is the amount of information stored by a digital device or other physical system that exists in one of two possible distinct states...
s and thereby guess the speed. Heatherington eventually suggested the use of a well-known character sequence for this purpose, recommending AT for "attention", which is prefixed on all commands.
The new design, housed in an extruded
Extrusion
Extrusion is a process used to create objects of a fixed cross-sectional profile. A material is pushed or drawn through a die of the desired cross-section...
aluminum case sized to allow a standard desktop telephone
Model 500 telephone
The Western Electric model 500 telephone series was the standard desk-style domestic telephone set issued by the Bell System in North America from late 1949 through the 1984 Bell System divestiture. Millions of model 500-series phones were produced and were present in almost every home in North...
to rest on top, was released in July 1981. It was known simply as the Smartmodem. The Smartmodem was the first modem integrating complete control over the phone line, and that allowed it to be used in exactly the same fashion with any computer.
Hayes originally had big plans for the form factor, referring to it as the Hayes Stack and intending to release a range of products that could be stacked beside the computer. In the end, only two non-modem devices were added to the line. The Hayes Stack Chronograph, an external real-time clock and the Transet 1000, a printer buffer and primitive email box. Both of these items' sales were apparently dismal. Early advertising referred to the Smartmodem as the "Hayes Stack Smartmodem", but this naming convention was dropped a short time later.
At the time of its introduction, the modem market was fairly small, and competitors generally ignored the Smartmodem. But it was not long before hobbyists were able to combine the Smartmodem with new software to create the first real bulletin board system
Bulletin board system
A Bulletin Board System, or BBS, is a computer system running software that allows users to connect and log in to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, a user can perform functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging...
s (BBSes), which created significant market demand. The market grew rapidly in the mid-1980s, and as the Smartmodem was the only truly "universal" modem on the market, Hayes grew to take over much of the market. Heatherington retired from what was then a large company in 1984.
Competition
The modem market in the 1970s was very simple and stagnant. Modems tended to sell at US$1 per baud. Hayes saw no need to be different — the original Hayes 300 baud modem sold for US$299 retail. At that price point, Hayes could build a "Cadillac of modems", using high-quality components, an extruded aluminum case, and a plexiglas front panel with a number of LED indicators.As the modem market expanded, competitors quickly copied the Hayes command set
Hayes command set
The Hayes command set is a specific command-language originally developed for the Hayes Smartmodem 300 baud modem in 1981. The command set consists of a series of short text strings which combine together to produce complete commands for operations such as dialing, hanging up, and changing the...
and often the Hayes industrial design as well. But in order to compete with Hayes on price, early competitors manufactured modems using low-cost components that were often unreliable. Hayes quickly gained a reputation for high quality, and for a period of time held a 50% market share.
Also differentiating Hayes from its competition was the Smartmodem's use of the guard time. Hayes had patented this concept in 1985 in patent #4,549,302, the Modem With Improved Escape Sequence With Guard Time Mechanism, generally referred to as the "Hayes '302 patent". Hayes licensed the guard time to other manufacturers for $1 a modem – a charge which competitors derisively termed the "modem tax". A number of manufacturers banded together and introduced the Time Independent Escape Sequence
Time Independent Escape Sequence
The Time Independent Escape Sequence, or TIES, was a short-lived modem standard invented to avoid a patent held by Hayes Microcomputer Products...
, or TIES, but it was not as robust as Heatherington's system and never became very successful.
In 1982, at the Spring Comdex in Atlantic City, Hayes introduced the Bell 212
Bell 212A
The Bell 212A modulation scheme defined a standard method of transmitting full-duplex asynchronous serial data at 1.2 kbit/s over analogue transmission lines. The equivalent, but incompatible ITU-T standard is V.22....
-compatible Smartmodem 1200 for $699, the first practical all-in-one 1200 bit/s Bell 212-compatible modem. The earlier design was redesignated the Smartmodem 300. At the time, Hayes was one of the few modem companies with the capital and engineering wherewithal to develop entirely new modem architectures. However, this was only a limited competitive advantage, since it was not long before companies offering Hayes "clones" introduced derivative 1200 bit/s models of their own.
The 1200 bit/s market existed for a relatively short time; in 1984 the CCITT introduced the v.22bis standard for 2400 bit/s operation. This was the first time that the CCITT's standard predated Bell's introductions, avoiding compatibility issues that had plagued earlier standards. Modem companies quickly incorporated v.22bis into their product lines. Hayes was no exception; the company introduced its v.22bis Smartmodem 2400 at US$549 in 1985 (the 1200 bit/s Smartmodem also remained available at a lower price point). Competition drove prices rapidly downward, and by 1987 a clone 2400 bit/s modem was generally available for around US$250. After 1987, modems increasingly became a commodity item.
Higher speeds and increased competition
Hayes was not as fast as some other manufacturers to release modems that ran faster than 2400 bit/s, which opened the door for U.S. RoboticsU.S. Robotics
USRobotics Corporation is a company that makes computer modems and related products. It sold high-speed modems in the 1980s, and had a reputation for high quality and compatibility. With the reduced usage of voiceband modems in North America in the early 21st century, USR is now one of the few...
(USR) and Telebit
Telebit
Telebit was a US-based modem manufacturer, most notable for their TrailBlazer series of high-speed modems. One of the first modems to routinely exceed 9600 bit/s speeds, the TrailBlazer used a proprietary modulation scheme that proved highly resilient to interference, earning the product an almost...
to meet market demand with faster products. In 1987 Hayes responded with the 9600 bit/s "Ping-Pong" protocol, which was later renamed "Express 96". The name referred to the way the modems could "ping-pong" the single high-speed link between the two ends on demand, in a fashion similar to the USR and Telebit protocols. However, the Express 96 both was late to market and lacked error correction, making it far less attractive than its competition. The design was generally unsuccessful, and for the first time Hayes lost cachet as the leader in modem design and manufacture.
Hayes's slow entry into the high-speed market led to a fracturing of the command set. In order to set up the modem to accept or reject certain types of connections, Hayes had added a number of new commands prefixed by & (the ampersand) to the Smartmodem 2400. When they moved to the Smartmodem 9600, they simply extended the set further, using the same syntax. The other companies involved all used their own syntax; USR used an incompatible set of &-prefixed commands, Microcom
Microcom
Microcom, Inc. was a major modem vendor during the 1980s, although they were never as popular as the "big three", Hayes, U.S. Robotics and Telebit. Nevertheless they hold an important place in modem history due to their introduction of the MNP error-correction and compression protocols, which were...
used \, and Telebit was based on setting a series of registers. All of these survived for some time into the early 1990s.
Through the late 1980s and early 1990s, new standard high-speed modes were introduced by the CCITT. The first of these, v.32, offered 9600 bit/s in both directions at the same time, whereas earlier high-speed protocols were high-speed in one direction only. In 1988 Hayes effectively abandoned their Express 96 protocol in favor of v.32, which along with MNP
Microcom Networking Protocol
The MNP family of error-correcting protocols were commonly used on early high-speed modems. Originally developed for use on Microcom's own family of modems, the protocol was later openly licensed and used by most of the modem industry, notably the "big three", Telebit, USRobotics and Hayes...
support was built into the 1199 USD Hayes V-series Smartmodem 9600. In 1990 the company introduced the Smartmodem Ultra 96 which offered both v.32 and Express 96 support, and added the new v.42bis error correction and compression system (in addition to MNP). v.32 modems remained fairly rare and expensive, although by 1990 third-party v.32 modems were available for approximately 600 USD.
V.32bis
In 1991, RockwellConexant
Conexant Systems, Inc. is an American semiconductor company, formerly the semiconductor division of Rockwell International. Currently it's privately owned by Golden Gate Capital, an equity firm headquartered in San Francisco.-History:...
introduced a low-cost chipset
Chipset
A chipset, PC chipset, or chip set refers to a group of integrated circuits, or chips, that are designed to work together. They are usually marketed as a single product.- Computers :...
supporting the new 14,400 bit/s v.32bis standard, along with similar v.32 and v.22bis (2400 bit/s) versions, all of which supported MNP, v.42bis and, optionally, 9600 bit/s v.29 fax
Fax
Fax , sometimes called telecopying, is the telephonic transmission of scanned printed material , normally to a telephone number connected to a printer or other output device...
modem capabilities. Their system was introduced commercially in the SupraFAXModem 14400
SupraFAXModem 14400
The SupraFAXModem 14400 was one of the first truly affordable v.32bis modems to come to market. Launched in January 1991 at a $399 price point, the 14,400 bit/s model was less expensive than most 9600 bit/s models, supported many additional features, and was housed in an attractive case...
, which went on to become a runaway bestseller. Soon there were literally hundreds of similar models on the market, and Rockwell's competitors also rushed in with similar chipsets of their own.
Hayes was never able to re-establish itself as a market leader through this era. They quickly introduced their own v.32bis model in the fall of 1991, the US$799 Smartmodem Ultra 144, but this point Express 96 had little cachet, and the market was already flooded with lower-cost modems. They then split their line into the Accura and Optima brands, offering the Accura as a low-cost model, although the feature sets were not that different between the two lines. Hayes eventually purchased two of their competitors, Practical Peripherals and Cardinal, turning them into low-cost brands in order to compete with companies such as Zoom Telephonics.
As speeds increased with the introduction of v.34 and v.90, Hayes increasingly became a follower rather than a leader. By the mid-1990s their modems were also based on the Rockwell chip set, and had little to distinguish themselves from other vendors.
Oddly it was the Rockwell chip set that also re-standardized the various command sets back on the original high-speed ones introduced by Hayes. As the Rockwell-based systems became more and more common, other companies, like AT&T, introduced new versions of their modem chip sets with identical commands. Rockwell had taken their commands from the V-series Smartmodems, so by the mid-90s the market was once again based largely on a "real" Hayes command set.
Decline and fall
Hayes realized that changes in the telephone networks would eventually render the modem, in its current form, obsolete. As early as 1985 he started efforts to produce consumer-ready ISDN "modems", betting the company on ISDN becoming a widespread standard — which was widely believed at the time. By the early 1990s, this was a major focus of the company.However, ISDN simply never happened. The whole model was based on end-to-end digital communications, and was thus limited to the speed of the long-distance carrier lines, either 56 or 64 kbit/s. The Bell companies were interested in deploying ISDN, but doing so required customer-end installations to make their conventional telephones work, which made the system unattractive for wide-scale deployment.
Additionally, the rise of the Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
in the mid-1990s made point-to-point communications far less interesting. After dialing their local Internet service provider
Internet service provider
An Internet service provider is a company that provides access to the Internet. Access ISPs directly connect customers to the Internet using copper wires, wireless or fiber-optic connections. Hosting ISPs lease server space for smaller businesses and host other people servers...
, the user could "call out" at high speed to services around the world, so the need for long-distance data calls was generally eliminated. As a result of this shift, there was no real need to limit the user to the speed of the long-distance lines, giving the Bell companies flexibility in terms of what to install at the user's site. Their attention turned to ADSL, which ran over the existing wiring and did not use up a phone line in the process. The end-user was offered much higher speeds while still being able to use their existing phones, with the added "benefit" of helping tie the user to the telephone company's own ISP.
Hayes, having bet the company on a system that was never actually deployed, had no new products in the pipeline. An effort was started to move into the market for ADSL and cable modem
Cable modem
A cable modem is a type of network bridge and modem that provides bi-directional data communication via radio frequency channels on a HFC and RFoG infrastructure. Cable modems are primarily used to deliver broadband Internet access in the form of cable Internet, taking advantage of the high...
s, but this was a multi-year effort during a period when USR increasingly took over the market. They entered Chapter 11 protection in November 1994, exiting in October 1995 as Hayes Corp. after selling 49% of the company to Nortel
Nortel
Nortel Networks Corporation, formerly known as Northern Telecom Limited and sometimes known simply as Nortel, was a multinational telecommunications equipment manufacturer headquartered in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada...
and a Singapore
Singapore
Singapore , officially the Republic of Singapore, is a Southeast Asian city-state off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, north of the equator. An island country made up of 63 islands, it is separated from Malaysia by the Straits of Johor to its north and from Indonesia's Riau Islands by the...
-based venture capital
Venture capital
Venture capital is financial capital provided to early-stage, high-potential, high risk, growth startup companies. The venture capital fund makes money by owning equity in the companies it invests in, which usually have a novel technology or business model in high technology industries, such as...
firm. In 1997 they merged with Access Beyond, a builder of ISP rack-mount modems and terminal server
Terminal server
A terminal server enables organizations to connect devices with an RS-232, RS-422 or RS-485 serial interface to a local area network . Products marketed as terminal servers can be very simple devices that do not offer any security functionality, such as data encryption and user authentication...
s, and changed the company name again, this time to Hayes Communications. The merger was primarily a way to take the company public. The stock started crashing over the next year, from around US$12 in early 1998 to pennies in October, when they once again filed for Chapter 11 protection. No new funding could be found, and in 1999 the company assets were liquidated.
The brand name was purchased and revived by onetime rival Zoom Technologies
Zoom Technologies
Zoom Telephonics, Inc. designs and produces Voice over IP gateways, DSL modems, cable modems, dial-up modems, Bluetooth products, and other communications products under Zoom, Hayes and Global Village brands....
in July 1999. Zoom continues to use the Hayes name on some of their products.