The USRobotics Sportster magic string was a modem AT command that exploited the fact that revision 4.1 USRobotics Sportster 14.4 modems had exactly the same internal hardware and circuitry as the much more expensive USRobotics Dual HST 16.8 modems. Both modems were produced in the early 1990s.
In ASCII, the magic string is represented as: ATGW03C6,22GW05CD,2F
The effect of setting a Sportster 14.4's "b" register to the value "6", and subsequently sending the magic string to the modem, is the modem "becoming" a Dual HST 16.8, which at the time retailed for roughly five times the price (~700 USD) as the consumer-oriented Sportster 14.4. After receiving the magic string, the modem identifies itself as USRobotics Courier 16800 HST Dual Standard.
Consequently, users fortunate enough to be in possession of this particular revision of the modem found themselves able to use digital communications protocols normally reserved for the corporate arena or Bulletin Board System SysOps, with hardware they would otherwise not have been able to afford.
USRobotics removed the ability for users to issue the magic string in subsequent hardware revisions.
Famous quotes containing the words magic and/or string:
“Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would ... be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever, not unlike the sorcerer’s apprentice who lacked the magic formula to break the spell.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“The most perfect expression of human behavior is a string quartet.”
—Jeffrey Tate (b. 1943)