Hayes Communications

» see hayes.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

the first time i typed at a modem at home was 1998. the modem itself was a 14.4 internal isa card, no-name brand, the kind bundled with a turkish dial-up subscription cd. the brand on the chip was not hayes. but the commands the chip understood were hayes. you typed ATDT and a phone number, and the speaker on the card went into its handshake song. then you were online. the AT was hayes.

hayes microcomputer products was started in 1977 in atlanta by dennis hayes and dale heatherington, working out of dennis hayes's kitchen. their idea was that modems should be controlled by the same serial connection that carried data, instead of by physical switches on the front of the box. heatherington picked AT as the prefix because attention was the right word for what the command did. that was 1981. the company was profitable for the entire 80s.

by the time i was learning how to coax 33.6 out of my 56k modem in 2000, hayes the brand was already in trouble. the hayes name was still respected. the modems people actually bought were us robotics or some cheap clone. hayes had gone bankrupt for the first time in 1994 and was on its way to the second.

~ the record ~

~ the AT command set ~

the AT command set was hayes's real product, more than any modem they shipped. once it was the de facto standard, every modem maker had to implement it or get rejected by the software stack. windows dial-up networking sent AT commands. so did linux pppd and the bbs terminal programs from the 80s. cellular modems still send a version of them in 2026.

the irony is that hayes tried to protect the standard with patents on parts of the escape sequence, and lost most of the cases. the standard spread anyway because by the time the courts ruled, every modem on the market already implemented it. hayes's reward for inventing the standard was that it became impossible to charge for.

~ the postmortem ~

the first chapter 11 came in november 1994. hayes had spent too much developing the optima line of high-end modems and isdn equipment, and consumer demand had moved toward cheaper devices. the company emerged from bankruptcy in 1996 by merging with access beyond and rebranding as hayes communications. it did not help.

the second filing was october 1998. by then dsl was eating the high end of the dial-up market, and cable modems were eating the rest. hayes had bet most of its r&d on isdn, a technology that almost nobody in north america actually wanted to buy. the company shut down operations in early 1999 and zoom telephonics bought the brand in july 1999 for about $5 million.

~ what it became ~

zoom kept selling hayes-branded modems for a while, mostly to enterprise customers who still needed dial-up backup. the at command set kept living everywhere. it sits inside the cellular baseband of every phone i have ever owned. dennis hayes himself stayed in georgia and started a smaller modem company. he spent the 2000s on industry boards.

the kitchen in atlanta where the two of them soldered the first smartmodem is not marked, and nothing of hayes microcomputer products remains as a corporate entity. the AT prefix that came out of that kitchen is in firmware on a planet's worth of devices, still doing what it was designed to do in 1981.

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