Practical Peripherals

~ the eulogy ~

My first modem in Turkey was a 14.4k card that came with the machine and carried no brand I can name. Then a 33.6k, then a 56k. All of them cheap, all of them claiming Hayes compatibility on the box, because that is what modems claimed. Practical Peripherals made exactly that kind of modem, and I am fairly sure I never saw the name on a shelf in Ankara. The category reached me. The company did not.

It was incorporated in 1981 in Westlake Village, California by Michael S. Seedman. It sold modems under the Practical Modem name from December 1985 and was bought by Hayes in August 1989 after a patent dispute. The brand was finally sold off in April 1999, when what was left of Hayes went to Zoom Telephonics for $5.3 million. Eighteen years, most of them spent as the affordable option standing next to a more famous product.

~ the dossier ~

~ the buffer years ~

Modems were not the original business. From 1982 the company sold print buffers under the Microbuffer name, which solved a problem that has stopped existing entirely. A dot matrix printer was slow, and while it printed, your computer sat there doing nothing because it was feeding the printer one character at a time. A buffer swallowed the whole job at once and then fed the printer at its own pace while the computer got on with something else.

There was a Microbuffer II for the Apple II and standalone units with serial and parallel ports for everything else. It is a good example of a product category that vanished into the things on either side of it. Printers got their own memory and operating systems got print spoolers. The box in between stopped having a reason to exist, and Practical saw that early enough to move into telecommunications around 1985.

~ bought by the plaintiff ~

The Practical Modem 1200 shipped in December 1985 and the modem line became the company's best seller almost immediately. The business was straightforward. Hayes had defined the command set and charged a premium for its own hardware, which left room underneath for a machine that did the same thing for less. Practical was not alone down there, but it was one of the better-regarded names in that space.

Hayes defended the command set with patents, specifically the escape sequence that let a modem tell the difference between data and a command. It sued. In August 1989 the dispute ended with Hayes buying Practical Peripherals, a resolution that suited both sides. Hayes stopped litigating and acquired a value brand it could sell without cutting its own prices. Practical got out from under a lawsuit it could not afford to lose.

For a while it worked. Practical booked close to $50 million in modem sales between 1990 and 1992 and peaked at around 700 employees. It moved into a 70,000 square foot building in Thousand Oaks. Two brands at two price points under one owner, in a dial-up market that was still growing every year.

~ the founder left first ~

Michael Seedman left in 1993 and went to U.S. Robotics, which is the detail that tells you where the dial-up market was heading. U.S. Robotics won the second half of the 1990s with the Sportster and the Courier while Hayes spent its research budget on ISDN and high-end Optima units that consumers did not want. Hayes filed Chapter 11 in November 1994. Practical lost 200 people that December and another hundred in 1995.

In September 1996 Hayes announced that Practical's remaining 375 employees would go over the following seven months, which ended the company as an operating business. The name kept selling modems for another two and a half years as a Hayes label. When Hayes filed again in October 1998 and liquidated, Practical Peripherals was a line item: one of six brands, alongside Accura, Optima, Cardinal and Century 2, that Zoom Telephonics picked up on 7 April 1999 for $5.3 million in cash. That number covered the Hayes name itself as well.

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