Hayes Microcomputer Products was a US-based manufacturer of modems. The company is known for the Smartmodem, which introduced a control language for operating the functions of the modem via the serial interface, in contrast to manual operation with front-panel switches. This smart modem approach dramatically simplified and automated operation. Today almost all modems use a variant of the Hayes AT command set. Hayes was a major brand in the modem market from the introduction of the original 300 bit/s Smartmodem in 1981. They remained a major vendor throughout the 1980s, periodically introducing models with higher throughput. Their competition through this period was primarily from two other high-end vendors, USRobotics and Telebit, while other companies mostly sold into niches or were strictly low-end offerings. In the early 1990s a number of greatly cost-reduced high-performance modems were released by competitors, notably the SupraFAXModem 14400 in 1992, which eroded price points in the market. Hayes was never able to respond effectively. The widespread introduction of ADSL and cable modems in the mid-1990s repeatedly drove the company in Chapter 11 protection before being liquidated in 1999.
Before Hayes
Dennis C. Hayes left the Georgia Institute of Technology in the mid-1970s to work at an early data communications company, National Data Corporation, a company that, among its many businesses, handled electronic money transfers and credit card authorizations. Hayes' job was to set up modem connections for NDC's customers. Hayes also worked for a time at Financial Data Sciences, which sold automated teller machines to the savings and loan (S&L) market, modifying machines sold by larger companies to large banks with the branding of the smaller S&L. From this company, he learned the value of selling into niche markets the larger players ignored. Hayes was a computer hobbyist, and felt that modems would be highly compelling to users of the new 8-bit computers that would soon be known as home computers. However, existing modems were simply too expensive and difficult to use or be practical for most users. He felt that this market was likely to be ignored by the larger modem vendors like IBM.
Early Hayes products
At the time, modems generally came in two versions, external modems using an acoustic coupler for connection, and direct-connection modems used with minicomputers or mainframes. Acoustic couplers were entirely manual; the user picked up the phone's handset, dialed manually, and then pressed the handset into the coupler if a carrier frequency was heard. Disconnecting at the end of the session was also manual, with the user lifting the handset out of the coupler and hanging it up on the phone body in order to depress the hook switch and return the phone to the on-hook state and end the call. This was a straightforward and thus a popular solution; the Novation CAT was a popular modem of this type. Internal modems had the advantage that they could use the computer bus not only to exchange data between the computer and the modem, but command and status information as well. This allowed them to control the entire connection cycle, dialing the phone to start, and hanging up at the end. Such systems were available for large machines, especially the mainframes used by banks which had to automatically dial their branches for end-of-day updates. None of these systems were available for microcomputers, and Hayes' initial concept was to offer similar products into this market. Hayes started producing such a system 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. At this time, it was illegal to connect any non-Bell hardware to the telephone network, so the 80-103A was designed to connect to a Bell-supplied Data Access Arrangement (DAA) which the user rented for a monthly fee. To fill in dead-times in the modem sales, they also took on part work doing electronics assembly for other companies. Business picked up quickly, and by January 1978 they had quit their jobs at National Data to form their own company, D.C. Hayes Associates. In its first year, the new company sold $125,000 worth of product (equivalent to $617,028 in 2025). Sales further improved in early 1979 with the introduction of the 300 bit/s Micromodem 100 for S-100 bus computers and the Micromodem II for the Apple II. As a result of Bell having lost several key lawsuits related to the connection of unlicensed equipment to its telephone network, by 1978 it finally became legal to connect any FCC-approved system to the Bell network. To comply, Micromodems were supplied their own DAA-like connector in the form of the FCC-approved "microcoupler": a small external box that connected to the internal modem card using a ribbon cable. In 1980, the company changed its name to Hayes Microcomputer Products.
The Smartmodem
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