Hayes command set history: The tech that dialed in a million modems
tedium.co
tedium.co
The commands have gotten more complicated, but as far as I know ATI will still give you a typical part identification code.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/07/apple-to-acquire-the-...
Only the Chinese (Huawei/HiSilicon) have come close to challenging Qualcomm in recent years, until they got shut down by US import restrictions and seem to have given up at this point.
Sadly DDG and Google can't find me anything with those keywords. Either that story has disappeared off the web, or search engines really suck nowadays.
Edit: Well, I found it, but I had to go to a blog where the story was quoted, and the blog author had written down the link not as a hyperlink: https://liw.fi/linux-anecdotes/
Given you found the story, it seems like it hadn’t disappeared off the web. However, search engines might suck.
> But in December, I mistakenly auto-dialed my hard disk instead of my modem. I was trying to auto-dial /dev/tty1, which is the serial line. But by mistake I auto-dialed /dev/hda1, which is the hard disk device. The end result was that I inadvertently overwrote some of the most critical parts of the of the partition where I had Minix. Yes, that meant I couldn’t boot Minix anymore. > > That was the point where I had a decision to make: I could reinstall Minix, or I could bite the bullet and acknowledge that Linux was good enough that I didn’t need Minix. I would write the programs to compile Linux, under itself, and whenever I felt I needed Minix I would just add the desired feature to Linux. It’s a big conceptual step when you drop the original hosting environment and truly make a program self-hosting, so big that I released the new version as 0.10 in late November.
Of course, maybe he did do the same mistake twice :)
One of the things we used to do when I first started was shuck modems. We would buy the consumer models, break open the plastic cases, pull the circuit boards out, and slide them into slots of custom enclosures. Then we would hand-assemble DB-to-ethernet adapters and plug them into serial controller banks.
We bought any and all modems, but the cheap models from US Robotics and Supra were really a game changer. The only tough part was that dealing with the slight differences in command differences on the client side needed to connect to the different modem types.
If you were an ISP, you had to support everything. For the 56.6k stuff, I remember us having two separate dial-in pools for X2 and K56flex.
Supra on the other hand offered ridiculous discounts
"A manufacturer that disappeared leaving a trace in the industry Supra where cheap modems were sold in large quantities even in Akihabara" 2/3 https://ascii-jp.translate.goog/elem/000/001/425/1425488/ind...
>Smartmodem 2400 had dropped in price to around $500 in 1987, but was still an expensive product. In 1987, Supra Corporation launched the SupraModem 2400, which is fully compatible with the Smartmodem 2400, for just $179.
https://opennet.ru/base/usersoft/3.txt.html
It did work on some modems with loose requirements around the timing and pauses.
Other modem manufacturers implemented the “time-independent escape sequence” to get around the patent[0]… the only issue being binaries that contained control codes and meddlesome kids.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Independent_Escape_Sequ...
I wonder if they still use AT commands today?
IOT hacking in general is a fun nostalgia trip. Edge device sims are limited to very paltry monthly data caps unless you want to pay fat money, and it's kinda fun to work within such tight constraints and think of ways to squeeze value out of every last byte.
Fun fact: it’s all still there in a lot of mobile chipsets, just like fax emulation :)