Standards which enforce loyalty

Press, 24 December 1985, Page 19

Standards which enforce loyalty

By

MICHAEL BYWATER,

technology editor of

“Punch,” writing in the London “Observer.”

S/S S/2740/3/F/500172 may seem in inauspicious piece of bureaucracy, and you might be forgiven for thinking that any organisation capable of coming up with such a monstrous piece of obscurantist and selfaggrandising nonsense deserves a kick up the backside.

And you would be right. But never mind, because S/S S/2740/3/F/500172 is what is printed on the bottom of my Hayes Smartmodem 1200, and it is the British Telecom approval code, which means that the modem at last officially complies with the CCITT V. 22 standards and everything is dandy. Should you by some abominable mischance be on the point of turning to P. Hillmore to see if he has anything better to offer, I beseech you, don’t. This stuff is seminal.

The reason why it was so good to have seen S/S S/ 2740/3/F500172 staring up at me this morning is a matter of de facto standards; those things which you must have are not necessarily those things you would like to have, but that’s the way the world wags. In the case of telecommunications, the buck starts with the modem. You can buy almost any modem, plug in your computer, fiddle around for hours with protocols and XOn, X-Off characters, baud rates, stop bits, parity and break codes, and eventually you will communicate with the outside world.

But chances are that if you own some complex and exciting software which will do all that for you, you will have noticed that half or more of its exciting expensive “features” are not available to you. The reason is a smart guy from Atlanta, Georgia, called Hayes, who got in on the act before anyone else had begun to think that microcomputers might usefully communicate with other computers. So if you wanted a modem in the United States, you bought a Hayes modem. If you were developing some-communi-cations software, you wrote it so that it worked with the Hayes modems. If you lived in the United Kingdom and bought that software, tough. This is not to say that there are not some excellent British modems around. One of my favourites is the DaCom 2123 GT, an excellent piece of kit which can compete with, and in many ways exceed, the capabilities of anything the Americans offer. But de facto standards again rear their heads. Good though the DaCom may be, it is not compatible with the Hayes protocols. So if you own a copy of Lotus Jazz or Open Access or Symphony, or any of the top-of-the-range businessmen’s integrated packages, you will find that they expect a

Hayes modem on the end of the string, and you’d better provide it or they’ll scream the place down. This undesirable but unavoidable situation has become a feature of what you might loosely call “new” technology. If you have found that you couldn’t play HMV records on your old Victrola, you would have quite correctly raised hell. Similarly, if you couldn’t run your car properly on anything else except Shell petrol. But the process now seems to be to force the poor suckers, i.e., us, into a kind of compulsory brand loyalty. The problem is at its least morally disturbing in the case of the Hayes modems. Hayes have produced a damned good product before anyone else, and the rest followed automatically: But there are deeply dodgy examples around if you look for them. For example, the well-known European maker of word processing equipment which forces you to buy disks at almost double the going rate by putting some secret but nonsensical coding on them, without which the machine goes “phut.” I suppose the situation is inescapable, given the complexity of most high technology. You can beat the de facto standards, but you need to be an expert to do

it The question remains whether or not it works to our advantage, and my gut feeling is that it cannot.

The current microcomputer standard is the IBM PC, along with Microsoft’s disk operating system. Because of the enormous investment in hardware and software which the market has made, the situation is unlikely to change. It is clear to all but the most besotted or short-sighted user that the technology employed in the IBM PC and its operating system is way out of date, and that the potential benefits to the user are being diminished. But what can you do? You cannot just chuck out your computer. Programmers can’t suddenly say: “We don’t like the PC-DOS system any more, so we are going to abandon it,” because they would immediately find themselves at a market disadvantage. This isn’t speculation; it has been tried, with a program which I regard as one of the best of its type. But it didn’t sell because its face didn’t fit. I have no answer to this problem, and I doubt if anyone has. For the moment then, let us be grateful (given the existence of de facto standards) that we can get our hands on something which meets them. By the way, I have just heard that DaCom have bowed to the inevitable and introduced a Hayes-stand-ard modem, which (I suppose) just goes to show.