Ball: Hayes Microcomputer Products

I had find many products about Internal Fax Modem from some websites such as

	In-ear Retractable Stereo Earphones.. In-Ear Retractable Stereo Earphone Headphones for PDA/Mobile Phones/Laptop/CD/MP3 PLAYER with 3.5mm..
	Toppie 7 Inches Headrest Car TFT-LCD.. No. B-705 Toppie 7 inches headrest car TFT-LCD monitor with TV Specification: 1. Display..

And you can see more from
Front Panel USB
cordless computer mouse
Digital LCD Display
Computer Bluetooth Mouse
fax internal modem
flexible computer keyboard
Color Computer Monitor
color laser printers
CD DVD Drive

Hayes Microcomputer Products was a U.S.-based manufacturer of modems. They are particularly well known for their Smartmodem, which 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.

Contents

1 Early History

2 The Smartmodem

3 Competition

4 Higher speeds and increased competition

5 V.32bis

6 Decline and fall

7 Notes

8 References

9 External links

//

Early History

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 computers. 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.

Dale Heatherington with the prototype 80-103A.

Micromodem II installed in an Apple II. Note the external "microcoupler" with the phone jacks and analog hardware, connected via the ribbon cable.

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 Micromodem II, a similar 300 bit/s design 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 bus, 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...(and so on)