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Re:Mystery GPS Tracker on a Supporter’s Car by 13of40 on Monday March 28, 2022 @09:38PM (#30837754)
I remember when the Hayes command set started to become the standard, because for a while you could get on a group chat on a BBS and press +++ATH to make the outbound modems hang everyone up. I think there was an AT command to remap that pattern, but it wasn't adopted by all the BBS software right away.

Edit: To clarify, before then you would have something like a 300 baud modem that didn't have an out-of-band command set, so you would dial the number on your phone and flick a switch on the modem to make it connect and everything would be sent to the other side verbatim. The "+++" is the escape sequence you send to a Hayes modem to break it into command mode, the "AT" is the prefix for the command (attention?), and "H" means "hang up". IIRC, puritans would say "ATH0" because the "0" represents some particular state to hang up to, but it's the same as "ATH".

Re:Mystery GPS Tracker on a Supporter’s Car by DonHopkins on Tuesday March 29, 2022 @09:35AM (#30842341)
The DC Hayes Micromodem II for the Apple ][ had its own weird command codes using control characters, with ^A at the "attention" command.

    IN#3 (Apple ][ command to hook input from slot #3)
    ^A ^F (modem command to set full duplex)
    ^A ^Q (modem command to pulse dial the following number)
    ^A ^Z (modem command to hang up)
https://mirrors.apple2.org.za/ftp.apple.asimov.net/documenta...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayes_Microcomputer_Products#E...

https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10264598...

https://www.ebay.com/itm/393165436881

Later on once the Hayes AT command set took over and BBSs became popular in the 80's, there was a flat $25/month subscription service called "PC Pursuit" that had banks of modems in different cities connected by a network, which you could dial up locally, then connect over the network to another modem, and dial out to a local BBS system. It was a subsidiary of Telenet, which spun off from BBN, and later was a subsidiary of U.S. Sprint.

http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/library/CONCEPTS/SERVICES/PCPU...

https://bbs.fandom.com/wiki/PC_Pursuit

https://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/tom-keating/voip/pc-pursuit---t...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telenet#PC_Pursuit

There was a fun game you could play called "PC Roulette", in which you first connected to a remote modem with the PCP command, then issued the command "A/" directly to the modem, to redial the last number somebody else dialed on that modem!