 | |
| Company type | Public |
|---|---|
| Industry | Modems |
| Founded | 1977 |
| Founder | Dale Heatherington |
| Defunct | 1999 |
| Fate | Liquidation; name acquired by Zoom Telephonics |
| Headquarters | , U.S. |
| Website | hayes.com at the Wayback Machine (archived 1998-02-02) |
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.