Vendor lineage
USRobotics
Won three times with proprietary protocols, and gave up all three the moment a standard arrived.
Casey Cowell and four partners founded U.S. Robotics in a garage in Skokie, Illinois in 1976, naming it after the fictional company in Asimov's robot stories. The first modem shipped in 1979, and the business only opened to the general public after the AT&T breakup in 1984 made it legal for anyone to attach equipment to the telephone network.
**The two product lines are the story, and the relationship between them is better than either.** The Courier was built for bulletin board operators and businesses: rugged, remote-diagnosable, and using an upgradeable digital signal processor, so a Courier bought in 1994 as V.34 Ready shipped speaking V.FC because V.34 had not been finished yet, and was upgraded in the field when it was. That is why the line was eventually called V.Everything. The Sportster, launched in 1991, was the consumer line, and by the mid-1990s a 28.8 model sold for around $149.
**They shared a motherboard.** On certain 14.4 Sportsters, a sequence of AT commands would enable the faster 16.8 HST mode the Couriers were sold for. The hardware was the same; the difference between the consumer modem and the professional one was firmware and price. **Segmentation by software rather than silicon is now so normal it has a name, and this is one of the places it was learned.**
**The company's actual pattern is proprietary-then-standard, three times over.** HST was USR's own high-speed protocol, and it worked: if the board you dialled had a Courier, transfers ran faster than anyone else could manage, which is why HST spread through the bulletin board world and made FidoNet mail runs bearable. Then V.32bis arrived and HST stopped mattering. Years later the same play ran again with x2 against a rival consortium's K56flex, and neither won, because everybody could see V.90 coming. USR dropped x2 when it arrived.
**That is worth stating plainly, because it cuts against a thread this site returns to often.** Elsewhere the timeline records neutrality and openness paying off - carrier-neutral exchanges, vendor-neutral certification, protocols that stayed open and became infrastructure. USRobotics did the opposite and it worked repeatedly: a proprietary protocol bought real advantage for real years. **What it did not buy was permanence.** Every time a standard arrived, the advantage evaporated, and the company was sensible enough to stop defending it.
Scale followed the Sportster. Revenue was $889M in 1995 and $1.98B in the year to September 1996, a 122 per cent increase. The company bought Palm in 1995, acquiring the PalmPilot, and was itself acquired by 3Com in June 1997. It was later spun back out, moved to Schaumburg, Illinois, and now belongs to UNICOM Global.
One detail from the operators' side deserves recording: the first large-scale Courier deployment on CompuServe's network uncovered a bug that crashed the modems and stopped them answering calls under heavy call volume. **The most reliable modem on the market found its limit the way everything does - at a scale nobody had tested.**
1995 Palm, Inc.
The company behind the PalmPilot handheld.
Part of USRobotics, then of 3Com, and later independent again - a corporate path more eventful than the product's.
- Wikipedia: HST making FidoNet transfers faster; the Sportster line in the 1990s; the V.Everything line released 1996; the shared motherboard and the AT command sequence enabling 16.8 HST on certain 14.4 Sportsters; the CompuServe deployment bug under high call volume; x2 against K56flex and the switch to V.90
- Grokipedia: founded 1976 in a garage in Skokie, Illinois by Casey Cowell and four partners; the name taken from Asimov's U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men; first modem in 1979; the Courier's rugged design and remote diagnostics; the Sportster launched 1991 with a low-cost DSP, around $149 for 28.8 by the mid-1990s
- HandWiki: the Courier V.Everything shipping in 1994 as V.34 Ready with only V.FC support because V.34 had not been released, and the upgradeable DSP design that allowed it to be brought up to standard later
- Encyclopedia.com: revenue of $1.98B for the fiscal year ended September 1996, up 122% on $889M in 1995; the Courier, Megahertz, Sportster, Total Control and PalmPilot product lines; 3Com attributing $2.5B of its FY1997 sales to USR
- Medium (Richard Baguley): founded 1976, first modem 1979, and modems sold to the public following the 1984 AT&T breakup; HST reaching 16.8 kbps against slower competitors
A retrospective feature rather than a reference work. Used for the founding and first-product dates, both corroborated elsewhere here.