Slashdot Mirror
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."
Certainly, hooking up on a modem was one of the things that made my computer cool compared to other people that didn't have one. Those were the days when you would dial up some BB and hear EEEEE aaaaaa iiiii shhhhhh oooo bong bong bing (you get the point....)
I remember cruising along with my 1200 baud modem why others were stuck with 300 baud! Too bad that these guys are now out in the cold (figuratively speaking, though maybe for some, literally) because it was modems that people used to first connect to the internet, not DSL or cable. Modems unfortunately will become nothing more than a tale that we can tell our grandkids about many years from now.
"Back in my day, we didn't have these fancy wireless petabit connections. We had to use 300 baud modems over the telephone (uphill, both ways by the way!) and we liked it!"
No trees were harmed in the composition of this; however, numerous electrons were inconvenienced.
Just look at:
1. Hayes: Dennis Hayes stays with company, guy who did the technical work, Dale Heatherington, leaves
2. Microsoft: Bill Gates stays with company, guy who did the techincal work, Paul Allen, leaves
3. Apple: Steve Jobs stays with the company, guy who did the techincal work, Steve Wozniak, leaves
So seems like techies have all the fun: start a company, keep a low profile, get rich, and then quit. That way the techie gets to spend the rest of their lives with enough money to just hack!
Sweet.
The story was meant to be a sad reflection on Hayes-the-man, ended up making me feel good about being a geek.
John.
Having been in this business since about the same time as Hayes, Katz and others you obviously have no idea what the difference between a acoustic coupler modem to, 300 baud, to 1200 baud, to 2400 baud and what we have now meant. Hayes was the standard after acoustic coupler. It defined everything up to 19.2k. When their designed reached the speed where I could not type fast enough to keep up, they changed the world.
Don't think about the web, think about your keystrokes think about those who saw they could send much more then just text for the first time.
(Never mind sending a 1 meg file for 60 minutes).
Tower
Everybody who knows Hayes remembers Ward Christensen's Xmodem file transfer protocol.
This was Ward in 1980. I wonder where he is now?I know people like to gloss over this stuff but it needs to be restated.
Gates and Jobs were both programmers in their own right. Just because they didn't STICK with the hardcore tech side doesn't mean they were never there to begin with.
Gates coded early versions of Basic software/DOS and Jobs coded Atari games and helped manufacture the first Apple's.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
The difference is that US lines tend to use in-band signaling and get 24 lines to a DS1 whereas Europe tends to use ISDN which gets 23 lines to a DS1 with a separate line for signaling (call setup/takedown, dialing, etc.).
So the maximum usable bandwidth of the lines in the US is 56k with the degredation from the in-band signaling (which may account for the high bit).
Who's down for developing a ppp-centered, kermit-over-IP protocol for places communicating by telephone only? I wrote a whitepaper on this and sent it to the Redhat/K12 newsletter.
Does anyone have easy to decipher conversion specs for baud xfer and UART? I've speculated most of the work is in hardware translation at the local level (send/receive from users end). I'd say bring in existing codes but projects like CKermit are too encumbered by Columbia elites or whatever school it is with their own agenda. Engineers and phreakers alike drop me a line. I'm in NW U.S.
The university I was at had a perpetual shortage of terminals on campus for their VM/SP system. After the usual tricks of removing the fuse from a terminal or putting the terminal into some mode where it appeared to be broken stopped working, I got got my own microcomputer at home and started dialing in. It soon turned out that cheap-ass U had only 5 dialup lines and contention was FIERCE. If the line dropped on my acoustic modem I sometimes had to dial for an hour to get another line. Enter Hayes and their wonderful autodial modem; I made a MS Basic program to continually dial and to immediately redial if the connection was lost. This worked beautifully and I practically had a home VM terminal for 2 years. Thanks again Hayes! (Posted anon 'cause I made a LOT of enemies doing this).
Hey,
.
.
I have worked for GPN (formarly NDC) since 1998 and moved in to Denis's old office last year. Yes while he was teamed up on all this he sat in this office and looked out this window! Funny thing is I now run the network over here and connectivty is still a core value. .
Now if only I could score some cash on the side. .
Ian Griswold
Director WAN/LAN Engineering
GlobalPayments Inc.
Sure dial 1200 or 2400 is up is slow, but back then we made good use of the stuff, mainly by doing direct host dial up rather than IP (not that there were a lot of ISPs back then). First up, no IP wrapper overheads. Second, you used text terminals - no graphics. Real work was more than just a theoretical possibility.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I didn't have a computer (yet), but it was a joy to type the appropriate AT commands from my MIME I video terminal (complete with lower case character set!) instead of having to dial the phone.
Before I had a real computer (a homebrew SWTPC 6809-based clone running Flex), and WAY before I had an IBM PC clone, I built a 6809-based SBC with 4K EPROM, 2K RAM (IIRC, it may have been more, but not much), and three serial ports. I wrote a monitor program for it so I could enter code, in hex, by hand (later, I would write a cross-assembler on Concordia University's CYBER 835 mainframe in Pascal, that spewed out S1S9 records that the monitor could read).
One of the first programs (hand assembled at the time), was a "RAM-dialer": it would control the Hayes Smartmodem to repeatedly dial one of a set of numbers until it got a data connection -- see in those days most BBSes had one phone line. Bliss!
Ah, the nostalgia of the early to mid 1980s.
You could've hired me.
I should also point out that although I've spoken with Dale many times, and even visited his lovely home, this article was a bit of a revelation to me. I had no idea that he was connected to Hayes. When I asked him what he did before retiring, he simply told me that he was an electrical engineer.
Your design to a real part online: Big Blue Saw
Hey, maybe you can answer something for me. USR sent out some free Sportsters with special ROMs loaded around 1996. They included a program and a request to call certain phone numbers and let it generate a data file. Then you dialed the BBS and uploaded the file. After that, you could pop in another ROM and it became a normal 33.6 PnP model.
My guess is that they were doing this to test the phone systems all over the country to see if X2 was viable. I figured they picked me because I was in on the sysop deal and had done the V.FC field trial for the Couriers.
Was I right? I can't think of any other reason why they would do something like that.
One final question, if I may: was the flashable Courier daughterboard really called the Whitney, and if so, was any other part of it called the Houston?
Everyone's reminiscing about 80's BBSes, so I'll throw in a word about my resurrected dial-up Commodore 64 BBS. (except over Telnet).
:-)
You can call it with a real 64, and there are programs now that support "ATDT 209.151.141.59" and so on. Call it Hayes 2.0 maybe?
--
Call Negative Format BBS - Hosted on a real C64!
Telnet to c64bbs.no-ip.com or 209.151.141.59 Port 23
http://home.ica.net/~leifb/bbs/
I think there's a LOT to be learned from analyzing this combination of personalities.
While it's true that the techies seem to "have all the fun" in these scenarios - it's also equally true that the techies needed the business-oriented/business-building personalities of their partners, in order to get themselves into a situation where their contributions became valuable enough to allow them to leave with a big "wad of cash".
Really, after reading the Hayes/Heatherton article, it appeared to me that Hayes' biggest reason for eventual disaster was a lack of any inventive/R&D motivated people working for him after Heatherton bailed out. Certainly, Hayes achieved all the brand name recognition and marketplace respect a tech. company could ever want. Properly run, his company could have been building, say, the #1 most popular DSL and/or cable modems used today.
I think Apple Computer thrives for exactly this reason. Steve Jobs is acutely aware that his company has to innovate -- never imitate. He may not be the mastermind behind any of the ideas, but he hires the types of people who can create cool looking and working devices/software.
The trick is, if you're going to be a "Hayes", keep hiring new "Heathertons" as your earlier ones get burnt out or want to move on.
Back in Spokane, most of the ISP's moved to the local Telco/bank building where we could buy T1's without haul charges. They just had to wire cat5 down to our room's. (Couple ladders, and you had a t1 hooked up that afternoon.)
With a room for a couple hundred, and savings per T1, a few livingston portmasters, and bam. ISP was 56K enabled. Being in the telco building also helped when you needed more digital circuits.
I left the small mom and pop ISP business and went to work for a telco before DSL came out. I always wonder how they hang on when the most customers drop dialup and move to cheap 30 bux a month DSL.
BTW, I remember when almost everyone ran WWIV BBS, and you could send email almost anywhere, and then the sysop fights started, WWIV BBS broke off into thier own groups, the national WWIV BBS chain was gone. Couple hundred BBS's all over the world, it was amazing, early version of the Internet. Real message forums, and email that worked. When it broke down, I gave up on BBS's. Lucky the Internet thingy was here, and we started migrating people to pay BBS's that had Internet access. Then added PPP module, then became a full ISP. You get the picture.
The Dial-Up Revolution?
The AJC reporter writes about Hayes and Heatherington, "making it easier for millions of people around the world to connect to the Internet." Perhaps the reporter didn't know there was anything before the 'net.
With all deference and due respect to their accomplishment, if we frame the discussion as a "Revolution"... "around the world", then Hayes and Heatherington did build the revolutionary weapon, but the trigger was squeezed by a fellow named Tom Jennings and a few of his friends. That was the shot heard 'round the world.
Hey! How many here can tell us their nodelisting? Hands?
Cheers!
Reports of my deaf have been greatly exaggerated.
It's not like it's that much different today, actually.
Today you download whole movies in Kazaa instead of single images in BBS, but the concept is the same. You waste some time, just to find out that it's something crappy.
Today the modem sounds are no longer heard and don't wake anyone, but Skyping with people for hours can.
Just think, a few years from now, you'll say "Voice\Video-on-demand in those days was so difficult!"
Sheesh. Before we bought Hayes modems, the company I worked for had some big honking UDS units with attached telephones. We also had a couple of acoustic couplers; in the Atlanta area, wet lines sometimes meant you only connected at *110 baud*. Slower than snail snot in July at the South Pole.
And there was no way I could buy a real modem one for home - way too many bucks.
Then came the Hayes. I used a 2400 baud Hayes for years, well into the 28K revolution (IOW, past the 19.2K glory days of Trailblazers), until lightning took it out. But guess what? The U.S. Robotics 28.8K I bought was based on the command set Hayes popularized.
I was mildly disappointed my Ascend ISDN router didn't understand AT commands. 8^/ I'm thinking of upgrading to rither cable or DSL, whcih means something much faster and cheaper must be about to break out!
When I was young and poor and stupid, I used to buy the cheapest equipment I could find, and then I would frequently berate myself when the quality turned out to be lousy and I needed to replace it shortly after buying it.
When I wanted to replace my old 14.4 modem, I decided I wasn't going to fall for that trap again. I wasn't going to buy a cheap clone. I was going to buy a brand name. I was going to pay extra for the security of knowing that it wasn't a compatable, it was the original. I bought a 56k internal Hayes modem. It cost a lot more, but it had a good guarentee and the brand name.
The modem was built before the 56K standard was offical, and they promised an upgrade to make it compatable when the eventual standard came out. The company folded before that happened.
Now I have a very expensive 56K modem that can only connect at 33.6 to any standard servers.
I hate it when I make a joke and I get modded "+5 insightful". Mod the stupid comments "funny", not "insightful", pleas