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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."
They're waiting patiently for the web to load.
They are working at AOL.
Blogzine
Fortress of Insanity
Where are the founders of the broadband revolution?
Working in bars, claiming benefits etc. etc.
"It's not your information. It's information about you" - John Ford, Vice President, Equifax
what would our world be like this technology wouldn't of been explored and helped along the way. i highly doubt the internet would be where it is today let alone any other form of technology.
the revolutionaries never make any money. they care too much about their ideas to be hardassed enough to profit. its always the people who come around later that just see a business opportunity.
turn up the jukebox and tell me a lie
for everyone who is broke after doing net related buisness, I wouldn't be broke.
at least at first, but then we remember stories like this one and realize maybe it ain't as bad as it could be.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
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.
I remember sitting eagerly in front of my 386, waiting for a single GIF from the adult door of the BBS to download at 1200bps. Then it always turned out to be something crappy that I wasted 5 minutes to download. Porn in those days was so difficult!
That damn callback verification feature always woke up my mom in the middle of the night when I was cruising the BBS's for porn... Thank god for these "always on" connections!
--
Rate Naked People at FuckMeter! Not work safe (unless your boss likes pr0n)
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.
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.
..Jeff Keegan
seven syllables explain TiVo: kee gan dot org slash ti vo
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
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Do you mean the great girl bands of the past? The Supremes, the Ronettes, or even the GoGos?
Check "VH-1 Where Are They Now?" to find out the fate of those great Broad Bands of the past.
I know about "Heart". They look like Roseanne Barr now.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Relive the good ol' days at textfiles.com
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?
"My God, this must be a truly remarkable corn chip, to be so widely and confidently touted."
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.
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.
I'm proud to initiate the Xmodem vs Kermit flamewar.
Let's get ready to RUMBLE!
Extra points for anyone who can segue smoothly into an Anti-Bush/Anti-US rant.
You asked for it ... ;)
In the US the phone lines are digitized with 8000 Hz and 7 bits, resulting in a bandwidth of 56 kbps. In Europe 8 bits are used, giving 64 kbps. I can't remember off-hand what Japan uses (they mix happily european and US standards )
So you can't go above 56k and hope to sell your modems in the US, thus losing at least half of your potential customers. It's just not theoretically possible.
Its ironic that people who have the motivation and ambition to earn $20 million will probably not stop there, but people who would stop at $20 million will never earn that much.
Your design to a real part online: Big Blue Saw
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).
Back in 1995/1996 when 56K modems were becoming the rage I also folded shop and sold my mid-sized ISP that was serving 2 cities. Hayes modem cards in a 19 inch rack chassi were the standard then, 33.6 was the MAX you could get on a good day and ISP's like me that spent the long dollar for the real modems instead of a pile of crap sportsters like one company I remember you could get that speed. (I started as an ISP when 14.400 was the fastest you could get.)
56K killed it for most of us... T1's required for incoming lines as well as horribly priced interfaces for the 56K dial up side made it impossible for the medium/small guy to survive. the Small towns I was going into and started out with 3-4 modems now had a minimum of 24 incoming lines because of the T1 requirement. each dial in node now doubled all it's costs for operation and quadrupled it's costs for equipment.
Dial-up died when 56K came around.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
I was in that bar once.
To get his attention, you'd to yell: +++
That 56K killed the dialup star?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
After reading some of the pompous replies in the recent Linux Certification topic, it's worth pointing out that Heatherington was not a 4-year CS major:
The company was recruiting people with master's degrees and Ph.D.s. Heatherington had a two-year degree from a technical college. "I think he felt funny having that kind of horsepower looking to him for guidance," Hayes says.
Keep that in mind when you sit there complaining about all us 'pseudo-engineers' that didn't have the cash to get a degree, but had the brains to make a difference in computing.
In other words, the rich keep doing what made them rich, the poor keep doing what made them poor.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
I also remember using "split" modems which were asymmetric -- 1200 downstream and IIRC 150 upstream -- which prefigure today's ADSL.
He's not a millionaire anymore with ex-wives taking most of his income. Kind of sad. No wonder people aren't getting married anymore.
I think that people who would stop at a certain level, and instead focus on activities rewarding in other ways than money are the more frugal and humble ones. The ones you never read about in Forbes, or watch on tv. The ones that never see a limit are the money-, power-hungry and attention-starved monsters that will do anything to prove they are better than you.
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.
Actually in europe they have E1 (~2 mbit as apposed to ~1.5mbit total), not a T1(aka DS1) with 30 channels and they can and do run something they call "E1 PRI" over those for 29 B channels and a D channel.
What you described is US PRI T1 which is 23 B channels with a D channel in the US at 64K each(this is what isdn service is based on, you can also run standard telco calls over them). US also has the standard T1 which is 24 channels as you described.
In Japan they call theirs a J1 (or PRI J1) and its based on the US standards, only in the yellow alarm generation/detection and the crc-6 calculation methods.
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.
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
The pioneers get the arrows, the settlers get the corn.
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.
Video killed the radio star...
Broadband killed the dialup generation...
But then reality TV killed MTV...
Ya gotta figure something will come along and wipe out broadband. My bet is on litigation...
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!
http://www.wa4dsy.net shows the data modem he constructed, and also has pages of info on his robots.
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
Moral of the story: don't get married if you're rich and successful.
Slashdot requires you to wait longer between hitting 'reply' and submitting a comment.
The hayes command set is like the Windows API, an accidental and hardly optimal interface that succeeded out of sheer chance, and which used creative and new (at the time) interpretations of intellectual proprty law to try to skewer their opponents.
The Hayes patent was, eventually, rendered obsolete. It can't happen too soon for Microsoft either.