Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!athena.mit.edu!peter
From: peter@athena.mit.edu (Peter J Desnoyers)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Look and feel
Message-ID: <4155@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
Date: 30 Mar 88 18:27:36 GMT
References: <252@calvin.EE.CORNELL.EDU>
Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Reply-To: peter@athena.mit.edu (Peter J Desnoyers)
Distribution: comp
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Lines: 20
Keywords: Hayes modems and "clones"

In article <252@calvin.EE.CORNELL.EDU> kevin@calvin.EE.CORNELL.EDU (Kevin Tubbs) writes:
>With all this talk about the look and feel of software, I was wondering
>why Hayes never sued (as far as I know) over the many openly "Hayes-
>compatible" modems on the market.  How does the command set of a modem
>differ from the "command set" of any other program, such as windowing
>software?
>---
>Kevin Tubbs, 5152 Upson, Cornell University, Ithaca NY, 14853  (607) 255-8703
>kevin@calvin.ee.cornell.edu  {ihnp4,uunet,rochester}!cornell!calvin!kevin

The last I heard, Hayes was going around filing suit against the
smallest companies that were imitating their command set. (This was
last fall.) What is interesting is that the infringement these
companies were being charged with was the progamable guard time
feature, surely a minor part of the whole setup. (Maybe because the
rest has become a de facto standard, and therefore arguably public
domain; there is even an effort to standardize the AT command set so
that Hayes can't change it out from under everyone else.)

				Peter Desnoyers