I got him to describe the setup. Then I asked him how he was making
> it dial. He told me that he was typing in 'ATD9,' and then the area
> code and the number.
> When Hayes designed the Smartmodem, they should have had the unit
> default to touch-tone instead of outpulsing rotor dialing by default.
> Incidents like this could have been avoided. I happened to know that
> this customer's PBX did not support rotary dialing. The 'T' I added
> to the string switched the unit from default rotary dialing to touch
> tone. Problem solved.
I'm confused. IIRC, the command was four characters, either ATDT or ATDP. Are you saying it would work with three?
Also, for dialing out of a PBX, wasn't a 'pause' character needed to allow time for the second dial tone?
Way back then a lot of people still had rotary service and most systems supported both. I don't think early on defaulting to pulse was such a bad idea for those days.
IIRC, Hayes was the leader in modems, but didn't they end up going bankrupt? I didn't understand that.
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I think we used 'ATT' for tone dialing
> and 'ATP' for pulse dialing. Fred, (in a help desk capacity) did you
> ever run across customers who _lied_, told you they had tried to do
> something but in fact had not done it at all.
That certainly does happen. But more commonly is people who _think_ they did something when they actually didn't, or for some reason what they entered didn't take (ie keyboard locked up and they didn't realize it -- that's very common.)