The who: Professor Norman Abramson first experimented with this in mid 70s
A 9600 baud UHF system was the result.
Early 80s Tucson amateur packet radio adapted this for hams. (I was sort of on the ground floor of this.)
Playing with telephone modems, I got old hat with Ax.25
Back in those days, I modified and reprogrammed an old credit card terminal to do the basic packet and run a Kenwood radio with the serial port.
These dataradio's are nearly the same thing (minus keyboard and display) On a 25 Khz wide channel, they can do 119.2 Kbaud (usually 9600) for like 900 Mhz systems.
They would be easy to reprogram for the ham world, even slow HF with the heavy FEC.
Yea, I know the max limit is 1200 baud, that is bandwidth constraints.
They don't have a big flash, so that could limit things.
Certainly a bit of work, I was just wondering if it would be worth the effort.
More and more, I see digital taking its place.
Cheers