USR was founded in 1976 in
Chicago,
Illinois (and later moved to
Skokie, Illinois), by a group of entrepreneurs, including Casey Cowell, who served as CEO for most of the company's history, and
Paul Collard who designed modems into the mid-1980s. The company name is a reference to the fictional company
U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men which featured prominently in the works of
Isaac Asimov. The company has stated it was named as an homage to Asimov because in his science fiction works U.S. Robots eventually became "the greatest company in the known galaxy", and USR appeared in
I, Robot (2004) as the fictional company itself. In its early years (circa 1980), USR was a reseller of computers, terminals and modems. At the time, commonly available modems ran at 300 bit/s, but 1200 bit/s using the mutually incompatible
Bell 212A and
V.22 standards were available at much higher price points. Even in 1983, 300 bit/s remained the most common speed. In 1984, the
V.22bis standard provided 2400 bit/s service, but these remained high-cost devices. USR sold its first modem, the
Courier, to corporate customers starting in 1979. In 1984, the breakup of
AT&T greatly lowered the cost of the testing needed for connection to the telephone network, which led to lower prices and wider use of modems. It began offering the Courier to the public in 1984. In 1986, USR introduced their
Courier HST, short for "High Speed Technology". Using
trellis encoding, HST provided 9,600 bit/s speeds, leapfrogging the standards efforts and offering four times the performance for about twice the price of a 2400 bit/s model. In 1989 HST was expanded to 14.4 kbit/s, 16.8 kbit/s in 1992, The Courier modems remained a favorite in the BBS and emerging
Internet service provider world, where they were known to run without problems for extended periods of time (although the initial large-scale deployment of Courier modems in the
CompuServe network uncovered a serious bug, which would cause the modems to crash and stop answering calls under high call volumes). A similar situation emerged a few years later when the 56 kbit/s
V.90 standard was first being proposed. USR developed its own 56k standard known as
X2, while a consortium of other companies introduced its own
K56flex. In contrast to the success of HST, neither X2 nor K56flex saw any real market uptake, as it was clear they would soon be followed by V.90 modems. After the introduction of V.90, USR abandoned support for X2. In a further effort to reduce the retail price of its modems, USR also marketed a
Winmodem that used software running on the host computer to perform some of the modem functions. it shipped with only
V.FC support, because
V.34 had not been released. A free V.34 firmware upgrade was made available later via
FidoNet, as well as the Internet. USR then surprised many early Courier V.Everything modem owners with a limited-time free offer of an X2
firmware upgrade, which added 56K speed capability. Finally, USR released a V.90 upgrade that was compatible with X2-upgraded Courier V.Everything modems. Even the 1994 hardware released pre-V.34 was fully V.90-upgradeable without hardware modification. There was a licensing key needed for some Courier V.Everything V.90 flash upgrades. The firmware could be loaded onto the modem, but it would work in "degraded" V.34 mode. After paying a fee, and having the modem dial USR, a license key was installed that enabled the V.90 functions. ==Commoditization==