[schoen]

I think Hayes had a patent on requiring the pause, so competitors' modems sometimes didn't enforce the pause aspect of the design?

Or is that an urban legend of some sort?

[alexjm]

Yes, you're looking for US patent 4,549,302:

> Thus, even if the file being transmitted [...] includes occurrences of the escape command string of bits, it is extremely unlikely that any random occurrence of the escape command would occur unintentionally in the environment of the entire escape sequence, that is, the escape command string surrounded by a second of no data on either side.