U.S. Robotics Corporation, often called USR, is a company that produces USRobotics computer modems and related products. Its initial marketing was aimed at bulletin board systems, where its high-speed HST protocol made FidoNet transfers much faster. During the 1990s it became a major consumer brand with its Sportster line. The company had a reputation for high quality and support for the latest communications standards as they emerged, notably in its V.Everything line, released in 1996. With the reduced usage of voiceband modems in North America in the early 21st century, USR began branching out into new markets. The company purchased Palm, Inc. for its Pilot PDA, but was itself purchased by 3Com soon after. 3Com spun off USR again in 2000, keeping Palm and returning USR to the now much smaller modem market. After 2004 the company is formally known as USR. USR is now a division of UNICOM Global, and is one of the few providers left in the modem market today. The division employs about 125 people worldwide.
History
USR was founded in 1976 in Chicago, Illinois (and later moved to Skokie, Illinois), by a group of entrepreneurs, including Casey Cowell, who served as CEO for most of the company's history, and Paul Collard who designed modems into the mid-1980s. The company name is a reference to the fictional company U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men which featured prominently in the works of Isaac Asimov. The company has stated it was named as an homage to Asimov because in his science fiction works U.S. Robots eventually became "the greatest company in the known galaxy", and USR appeared in I, Robot (2004) as the fictional company itself. In its early years (circa 1980), USR was a reseller of computers, terminals and modems. At the time, commonly available modems ran at 300 bit/s, but 1200 bit/s using the mutually incompatible Bell 212A and V.22 standards were available at much higher price points. Even in 1983, 300 bit/s remained the most common speed. In 1984, the V.22bis standard provided 2400 bit/s service, but these remained high-cost devices.
USR sold its first modem, the Courier, to corporate customers starting in 1979. In 1984, the breakup of AT&T greatly lowered the cost of the testing needed for connection to the telephone network, which led to lower prices and wider use of modems. It began offering the Courier to the public in 1984. In 1986, USR introduced their Courier HST, short for "High Speed Technology". Using trellis encoding, HST provided 9,600 bit/s speeds, leapfrogging the standards efforts and offering four times the performance for about twice the price of a 2400 bit/s model. In 1989 HST was expanded to 14.4 kbit/s, 16.8 kbit/s in 1992, and finally to 21 kbit/s and 24 kbit/s. USR was not the only company making modems with proprietary protocols; Telebit's TrailBlazer series of 1985 offered speeds up to 19.2 kbit/s, and Hayes also introduced the 9600 bit/s Express 96 (or "Ping-Pong") system. However, USR became the most successful of the three, due to a marketing scheme that offered large discounts to BBS sysops. It was a favourite in this market not only for its performance, but its superb stability, with sysops suggesting new sysops "Just get the Courier, you will NOT be disappointed, it is excellent."
The proprietary nature of HST allowed USR to maintain its market predominance even when off-brand V.32-based modems began selling for less than equivalent HST modems. As the price differential decreased, however, V.32-based modems eventually became a cost-effective alternative to HST. USR countered by creating ever-faster HST protocols, starting with a 14.4 kbit/s mode, and by producing "Dual Standard" modems that were able to communicate with both HST and V.32 modems at high speeds. Due to many modems with similar performance on the market at even lower price points, the Courier's advertising focused on quality and reliability, "Once you have used a Courier, nothing else is a modem in your book at any price. They are the very best there is." To compete with the ever growing market for low cost consumer models, USR introduced their Sportster line. These supported only V.32 and later standards, they retained their own higher-speed HST standard only for the Couriers. During this time, Couriers were available in V.32, HST, or the more popular Courier Dual Standard models which supported both. The Sportster used the same motherboard as the Couriers, and on certain 14.4 kbit/s models a sequence of AT commands could be issued to enable the faster 16.8 kbit/s HST mode. The Courier modems remained a favorite in the BBS and emerging Internet service provider world, where they were known to run without problems for extended periods of time (although the initial large-scale deployment of Courier modems in the CompuServe network uncovered a serious bug, which would cause the modems to crash and stop answering calls under high call volumes).
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