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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

There was a period when various modem manufacturers were pushing speed limits and they did some non-standard things to do so. As I recall, USR's 9600 bps was one of the more non (Hayes) standard. Since you mention ISPs though, this was probably a bit earlier.

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Yeah, but there were definitely incompatibilities with every speed increase. When 28.8k modems were coming out, the spec was not set yet, so several vendors released early versions (anyone remember v.fast?) and then updated the modem firmware later when the standard was set. And then when 56.6k modems came along, USR had X2 and Motorola and others had K56flex. About a year later, v.90 and v.92 came along to standardize everything.

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.

I vaguely remember v.fast. I was still using dialup into the the 56K days. When I bought my house in the late 90s, it was pretty much peak dual POTS phone lines days. I didn't even have cable TV at first and it was probably a few years before I was able to get broadband.

USR had HST (High Speed Transfer), but the king was Telebit with TrailBlazer utilizing PEP (Packetized Ensemble Protocol). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telebit#PEP_and_the_TrailBlaze...

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.

You might be right about the USR 9600 bps mode, but for certain their original 14.4k bps mode was proprietary and named "HST." I still fondly remember when I got my Courier HST and witnessed its intense speed boost versus my prior 2400 bps modem.

There were 9600 bps USR Courier HST models. Pretty sure I still have one up in the attic unless I've tossed it. I forget what I had in the 14K generation.

Maybe I am misremembering, then. Perhaps I had a 9600 bps HST.

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