By Elliott Brack
Editor and publisher, GwinnettFoum
MAY 1, 2026 | It’s good to re-connect with Dennis Hayes. Some may remember him and his partner, the late Dale Heatherington, as the inventors and manufacturers of the modem in the 1970s that put Norcross on the map as the technological center of Georgia. Their firm was Hayes Microcomputer Company. It allowed a first-time quick way to connect the computer with the telephone, and to the Internet.
When Dennis was 36, his vision began to bother him with retinitis pigmentosa. He was legally blind by age 50, stopped driving a car and lived for a while in New York City, where its transportation systems made it easy for a blind person to get around.
Eventually he moved back south to Roswell, and his active mind kept up with technology. It was a move back to his native Spartanburg, S.C. in 2014 that proved a turning point. He bought a house near where he grew up, thinking he would retire. “After a few months, I was so bored I couldn’t stand it.” He joined Greenville Greenhouse Business Incubator as an entrepreneur in residence in 2015.
He also became involved with a Raleigh, N.C. cybersecurity firm, becoming a board member, and was a volunteer mentor for Venture Mentoring System in Greenville.
A call from former Georgia Tech President Bud Peterson led to more connections and other ventures.
In 2020, friends in Spartanburg began a nonprofit, Hear2There, which got major funding, leading to help visually-impaired users. A recent announcement said that Peachtree Corners will soon be the first in Georgia to deploy this service to help impaired people move around their community easier.
Then something different happened. Dennis made contact with Cathy McBride, also originally from Spartanburg, who graduated from high school two years behind Dennis, and was living in Woodstock. Last July, the two were married, becoming monthly nomads between their two homes. “She’s a terrific help for me.”
Living partly in Georgia led to being asked to serve as a director of Georgia Tech’s American Technology Venture Lab being set up to license corporate research project solutions from Ga. Tech and commercialize them to firms around the world.
A new project is in Spartanburg. “Upstate South Carolina is growing rapidly like Gwinnett in the 1980s to ‘90s. But Spartanburg County has 819 square miles, twice what Gwinnett has, and people are rapidly moving in there. That can only happen if the infrastructure is there. So Gwinnett is the closest analogy and we’re doing an analysis of about 80 pages, and about to go to print with it soon.”
At age 76, Dennis seems busier than sighted persons.
How does he do all these projects? From the get-go, he got a lot of help from interns — “Since for me, working on the PC is hard to do. We keep the interns busy. We use the phone a lot. We dictate to it and correct the dictation. The way it all works, we make it look professional.
“We also read audible books a lot. I probably read (listened) to about 100 books in the last year. And even some movies are good if they have a lot of dialogue. We have a wonderful time playing with our toys.”
That’s catching you up on Dennis Hayes, continuing to be inventive.
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