 This provided a growing market for other vendors, who licensed the Hayes patents and competed on price or by adding features.Through the 1980s, a number of new higher-speed modems, first 1,200 and then 2,400 bit/s, greatly improved the responsiveness of the online systems, and made file transfer practical.This led to rapid growth of online services with their large file libraries, which in turn gave more reason to own a modem.