Dennis Hayes

About 20 years ago, Dennis Hayes noticed a decline in his peripheral vision and difficulty seeing at night. The medical diagnosis: macular degeneration, a disease characterized by the malfunction of light-sensing cells in the central retina.

But Hayes hasn't let the deterioration of his eyesight curtail his technology vision. The 53-year-old pioneered the PC modem and today champions Internet accessibility, both inside and outside Washington, for the visually and hearing impaired. What's more, the sounds and sensations in his day-to-day life help fill the void. Hayes, who hails from Spartanburg, S.C., and Atlanta, currently lives in New York, and he said the city gives him a sense of independence he didn't have before. "I can't drive because of my eyesight, and in Atlanta, someone had to take me everywhere I wanted to go," Hayes said. "Here, there are the subway, trains and buses."

Added Dave McClure, president and CEO of the U.S. Internet Industry Association (USIIA), a Washington trade group: "At this point, I don't think you could pry him away from New York with a crowbar."

As USIIA chairman, Hayes advocates effective Internet policy, a role born from his invention of the PC modem in the late 1970s. At that time, he worked at a computer services firm that used leased-line modems for point-to-point connectivity between microcomputers. He wanted to open those lines of communication so any one system could talk to another. From his basement, Hayes created the standard AT command set, a software string that let any computer with a serial port activate features on an intelligent modem. In June 1981, Hayes introduced the Smartmodem and launched D.C. Hayes & Associates in Norcross, Ga.

With one stroke, he set the stage for computer-to-computer communication and the emergence of the Internet. Before long, D.C. Hayes & Associates became a 1,500-employee company operating in 44 countries.

But as the fickle hand of fate would have it, the golden age didn't last. In a press release issued in 1994, Hayes' company, which had been renamed Hayes Microproducts, announced plans to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. According to Hayes, increased product demand had created a supply backlog, and the modem operation was bleeding red ink.

Though Chapter 11 heralded hard times ahead for the company's engineering department, it got Hayes noticed by the media. He capitalized on that exposure by hiring Georgia Chamber of Commerce staffer Susan Merkel to his public relations department,but not as a marketer of the company's products. Instead, Hayes wanted her to infiltrate the world of public policy by networking with the press and politicians. "At the chamber of commerce, Hayes modems were everywhere," Merkel says. "I was awed to meet this high-tech celebrity."

The inventor's objective was much broader than just reviving his business: The computer connectivity space, which had been revolutionized decades before by Hayes' modem, was changing again because of the Web, and he wanted his finger on its pulse.

"He's always been a big-picture thinker, and he was concerned about what would happen to the Internet industry based on bills that were coming through [the legislature]," Merkel said. "He wanted me to build connections with local communities and governments."

With Merkel's help, Hayes made a lot of headway. At a BBS trade show in 1994, he met McClure for the first time. "I'd been bugging him about starting a trade association for a while, and I had sent him a proposal," McClure said. "We spent an hour or two over lunch, and he never said a word about my idea. But that night, at the end of his keynote, he pointed to me and said, 'Oh, yeah, and by the way, we're starting a trade group. To sign up, go see that guy over there.' "

That evening, the Association for Online Professionals, or AOP, was born. Around 1998, it would become the USIIA.

Meanwhile, back in Georgia, Hayes withstood some mudslinging from the press when a few Atlanta-based newspapers shifted the spotlight from his company's financial woes to the CEO's personal life. "He was in the middle of a nasty, bitter divorce from his first wife, and a few Georgia pubs were gunning for him," Merkel said. "But I never saw him lose his composure or point any fingers."

Merkel recalls that Hayes' casual demeanor was apparent when she interviewed for the job at his company. "He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and he was very laid-back and honest," she said. "I've met a lot of other visionaries since, and some are pretty full of themselves, but Dennis isn't. I once asked him [at a trade show] if it ever struck him that none of this [networking technology] would be here if not for his invention. He just said, 'Nah, I had a lot of help along the way.' "

Hayes made a comeback in 1996. His company emerged from Chapter 11, and he scored a victory for the AOP by swaying longtime fishing buddy Newt Gingrich, then Speaker of the House, to dilute the Communications Decency Act (CDA). Called a "chilling piece of legislation" by USIIA members today, the CDA proposed a new standard for indecent Web content and held service providers accountable for what subscribers viewed and downloaded.

"Dennis asked [Gingrich] to tweak the bill and got him to add the Good Samaritan provision, which said that ISPs were not liable for the information that flowed through their systems without their knowledge," said James Butler, an attorney at Atlanta-based law firm Wellborn & Butler, which does some work for the USIIA. "Without that provision, ISPs would have had to spend billions of dollars to monitor [Internet] traffic."

At the same time, the IT sector continued to metamorphose, and it wasn't long before intense competition and eroding margins in the modem and connectivity market forced Hayes Microproducts to the brink of dissolution once again in 1998. This time, Hayes couldn't pull off the turnaround. After a year of trying to pick up the pieces, Hayes Microproducts shut its doors. Hayes sold his assets to Zoom Telephonics and turned in a different direction. Hayes bought a defunct Mexican restaurant in Atlanta and dubbed it the Whiskey Rock Saloon. "We did a lot of renovations there," Hayes said, chuckling at the memory. "We painted the whole place black."

Hayes said he enjoyed booking bands and rubbing shoulders with the musicians who played at the bar from 1999 to 2000. Unfortunately, the saloon burned down that year, and Hayes never rebuilt it.

Today, he dabbles in real estate and travels regularly to Atlanta to visit his four children. But he divides most of his time between the USIIA and Virtual Resources LLC, a company he started after the Sept. 11 attacks to help high-tech security startups.

One issue in particular tops Hayes' current agenda: the Net Tax Nondiscrimination Act, or S.150, which would permanently ban state governments from taxing Internet access. In 1998, Hayes helped draft and pass the precursor to the Nondiscrimination Act, the Net Tax Freedom Bill, which placed a moratorium on state taxation of Net access. That bill passed muster again in 2001 but was due to expire on Nov. 1, and now Hayes and his peers at the USIIA are working around the clock to push the act through Congress.

Friends and colleagues say that if anyone can do it, Hayes can. The inventor is also using his clout to raise awareness among legislators and Internet players about improving Web site accessibility for people who, like him, are visually impaired. He anticipates that heightened awareness and technological advances will compel Web developers to make audio an integral online element.

Perhaps he'll be right. And then the Internet may someday give something back to a man who helped make it what it is.

 Published for the Week Of December 15, 2003