Where Are The Founders Of The Dial-Up Revolution?

RIMBoy writes "The Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently tracked down the founders behind the dial-up modem revolution. The founders of Hayes Micromodem set the standard with their AT Command set. While Dennis Hayes finds himself inducted into the Computer Industry Hall of Fame, at the same time he is broke (with a stop as a bar owner) and trying to find the next big thing. Dale Heatherington cashed out early and has dedicated himself to several projects, including ham radio."

Comments

BBS Documentary

[jkeegan]

It's been covered on slashdot many times so I'm sure people will remember, but there is a BBS Documentary in the works.

The history of such revolutions should be documented for future generations to learn from.

Legal, not technical

[AtariAmarok]

I remember reading that the 56K limit was legal, not technical (and that this legal limit is actually something like 53K:

"In the U.S., the FCC places a power ceiling on phone lines of -12dbm average per 3 second interval. X2 modems work within this by restricting throughput to 53kbps in the U.S. X2 modems can theoretically work at 56k, although they are constrained to operate 5% slower than this in the U.S. (Some users have reported occasional connections past 53kbps.)"

(from this page

Re:Legal, not technical

[blogboy]

I worked for R&D at US Robotics for the first 56K rollout. Cots in the lab, X2 coffee (twice the grounds) as I used to call it, all week and weekend, to beat Rockwell to the punch. And we did. The first batches of course hit in mid-40's but steadily improved. Rockwell would *report* 53K or so but the actual thruput was far less. It was one of the last great times in R&D I had. Line noise is the limit. It explots the digital switching on the network. Good times.

Re:Legal, not technical

[Burdell]

The "53k" limit was a problem with the way X2 worked. Blaming it on the FCC is just a marketing scam; the fact is that the US Robotics engineers couldn't make X2 hit 56k and still work within the pre-defined limits of the telephone system, so they tried to blame someone else.

Lucent's 56k system could actually do 56k and stay within the limits, but the v.90 standard didn't use Lucent's technology for that.

As to why nothing is more than 56k: that is all that a standard voice line (or POTS line, for Plain Old Telephone System) can do. A POTS line is carried within a DS0 (the base channel of the phone system), and a DS0 is 64k. You can't get all 64k though, because many voice lines use "robbed bit" signalling that takes one of every eight bits to handle switch communication. Getting 56k at all requires that one end be a digital line (ISDN BRI or PRI or channelized T1); you can't push 56k through the analog to digital conversion otherwise.

The "what's next" for the telephone system is already here; it is DSL. DSL uses different frequency bands that are not used for POTS lines but that can be carried over the same copper reliably (more or less). However, DSL is not a switched circuit like a modem connection; the DSL frequencies are pulled off the line (by a DSLAM, DSL Access Multiplexer) before the line connects to the regular phone network. So, you can't "dial" a different DSL provider or your friend's house; you can only be connected to one service (and any changes require a call to the DSLAM owner, usually the phone company).

The other "what's next" was ISDN, which would give you the full 64k channel (because signalling is always done on a separate dedicated channel with ISDN), or 128k if you use both channels (the base ISDN line is a BRI, which has 2 64k data channels plus a signalling channel). However, ISDN use was slowed because it was complicated to configure (you couldn't just plug a phone in and use it), required all new equipment, and even the telcos really never understood it well (so when there was a problem, it could take weeks to get it fixed).

Re:Legal, not technical

[blogboy]

Yes, I remember that X2 analysis feature, don't remember the commands tho :) The USR BBS were X2 Total Control racks. Part of the negotiation is a line analysis phase, which was used to determine the best protocol to use (that's the bonging noises testing for 56K capability.)

I think the V.FC couriers needed a daughterboard upgrade in order to support the X2/56K code; the V.34's just needed to flash update their ROM. USR supported the hell out of their Couriers--they knew who their important customers were IMO.

The Whitney was USR's most reliable platform. You could tell what board you had by the last few numbers of your modem's serial number. I think if it ended with 00 you had a Whitney.

Don't know the Courier daughterboard name. There was no Houston IIRC. The modem names were based on Harley Davidson motorcycle names (Courier, Sportster) Not sure where the internal board names came from...

HTH

I got my Multitech 300 Acoustic coupler out

[teamhasnoi]

and dialed until I found this AT command Set

Relive the good ol' days at textfiles.com

Re:56K limit...

[crow]

Because that's all the bandwidth there is.

Most calls get digitized by the phone company, and the 53K modems take that into account to get almost all of the theoretical bandwidth. I know someone will correct me, but I think that most phone calls are digitized as 64Kb data streams. There may be some overhead in that, lowering the theoretical maximum throughput.

Of course, if all the phone companies upgraded their equipment to some different standard, they could probably support significantly higher data rates. But then again, isn't that called DSL?

Re:56K limit...

[mdmarkus]

Between the Central Offices, the connections are digital and multiplexed. The amount dedicated to each channel is 64k with 8k used for switching information. So while it's possible to run better than 56k over a phone line pair (DSL does it at least for limited distances), once you hit the CO, the 56k limit comes into play.

Re:Easy

[The Salamander]

man motd
man login

touch ~/.hushlogin

Ward Co-INVENTED the BBS! was Re:XModem

[netringer]

Everybody who knows Hayes remembers Ward Christensen's Xmodem file transfer protocol. This was Ward in 1980. I wonder where he is now?

Ward Christensen is right here!

More importantly, as I've mentioned Ward, with Randy Suess, also INVENTED THE BBS when this very same Dennis Hayes sent them one of his original 300 baud autodial/auto-answer modems.

Ward will tell you fun details like why CBBS looks for the modem's RING result and then sends the ATO to make the modem answer. CBBS never puts the modem into auto-answer mode.

Why? So that if the CBBS program wasn't running happily, the caller wouldn't waste money on an answered phone call to a BBS that wasn't working.

Ward takes more credit for CBBS than the MODEM* protocol because MODEM was written quickly to fix a problem (sending program files to Randy over the modem-modem link) but CBBS was planned. Ward says MODEM was a response "like a sneeze" He doesn't like taking credit for a sneeze.

* - The real name of the protocol is MODEM. Ward's original MODEM comm program had an option to auto-receive files,. XMODEM was MODEM with the option. When you're the first you don't put in version qualifiers.