US Robotics Drivers

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Company: US Robotics

Description: U.S. Robotics was started in 1976. The original headquarters were located in Chicago, Illinois. The offices were later moved to Skokie, Illinois. The founder Casey Caswell served as CEO for most of the company’s history. Another notable founder is Paul Collard who specialized in modem development during the mid-80s. Other founders were entrepreneurs. The name of the company was taken from writings by Isaac Asimov. The acronym USR is often used to refer to the company.

USR bought Palm, Inc. in 1995. The 3Com Corporation, in turn, bought USR in June 1997. US Robotics was rebuilt as a 3Com-owned subsidiary in June 2000. The revived company contained all the assets and functions of 3Com’s modem business. Other assets and product lines of USR were retained by 3Com as the CommWorks Corporation. USR’s product line expanded from modems to include wireless access points, routers, gateways and network switches.

U.S. Robotics created dial-up modems. The company created a pre-cursor to the V.32 series of protocols used in modern modems. The earlier technology was called High-Speed Transfer (HST) protocol. HST was launched in 1986. Updated versions were released in 1992 and later. The updated protocols increased the bitrate from the original 9600 baud (a rate of measurement using pulses and symbols to measure data volume instead of bits or bytes) to 14.4kbit/s, 16.8kbit/s, 21kbit/s and finally 24kbit/s.

After V.32 protocols were used, USR started enabling their modems to use the protocol. HST was also enhanced to handle the more efficient phone lines and larger volumes of traffic. Another reason for USR modems’ success is a package that offered discounts to system operators of Billboard Systems (BBS). The BBS and modem could be used to provide more efficient file transfers on BBS-like FidoNet.

USR later created the X2 protocol for the development of a 56 Kbit/s modems. It used the updated V.34 protocol to upload data at 33.6 Kbit/s and download data at 56 Kbit/s. It was released at the time in direct competition with K56flex, which was created by Lucent and Rockwell. Both proprietary protocols were abandoned when the V.90 protocol was established as the industry standard for 56 Kbit/s. A software modem was also developed by USR. It was given the trademarked name Winmodem as it was compatible with the Windows operating system and IBM-PC compatibles.

A private equity firm bought the company in 2005. USR now operates as the property of Platinum Equity. The company has about 125 employees worldwide. It is also one of the few remaining companies selling and manufacturing voiceband modems.