Dale Heatherington (born 1948) helped Dennis C. Hayes in the development of

Hayes Microcomputer Products Hayes Microcomputer Products was a U.S.-based manufacturer of modems. The company is well known for the Smartmodem, which introduced a control language for operating the functions of the modem via the serial interface, in contrast to manual operat ...

, the company that pioneered the Hayes modem and the

Hayes command set The Hayes command set (also known as the AT command set) is a specific command language originally developed by Dennis Hayes for the Hayes Smartmodem 300 baud modem in 1981. The command set consists of a series of short text strings which can b ...

. Although a southern newspaper described him as "just a multimillionaire who likes tracking his cat with a homemade radio transmitter," Heatherington's career went beyond the modem company, including work in the area of game robots. Funding for his robotics can be traced to "had his name on all the important patents." Coupleur-accoustique-IMG_0298

History

Hayes and Heatherington, having met as fellow employees of

National Data Corporation McKesson Corporation is an American company distributing pharmaceuticals and providing health information technology, medical supplies, and care management tools. The company delivers a third of all pharmaceuticals used in North America and emplo ...

, formed a company to facilitate automating the process of dialing a modem. Their offering "happened to be the first modem created for a personal computer." The company is also noted as "the first to integrate its own command set" (known as the ''Hayes command set''). This automated hardware and software combination contrasted with the work they had performed at ''National Data'', where they handled electronic money transfers and credit card authorizations (manually dialing, using

acoustic coupler In telecommunications, an acoustic coupler is an interface device for coupling electrical signals by acoustical means—usually into and out of a telephone. The link is achieved through converting electric signals from the phone line to sound a ...

modems). A 1981 look at the ''Hayes'' firm's internal operation described Heatherington as "technical guru .. provide technical solutions." Heatherington retired from ''Hayes Microcomputer'' in 1985; his share of the firm resulted in receiving $20 million. The Hayes company's products were superseded by higher speed

Modem A modulator-demodulator or modem is a computer hardware device that converts data from a digital format into a format suitable for an analog transmission medium such as telephone or radio. A modem transmits data by Modulation#Digital modulati ...

s, and Hayes Microcomputer Products went bankrupt in 1998.

Education

Heatherington majored in electrical engineering at

Southern Polytechnic State University Southern Polytechnic State University (also called Southern Poly; abbreviated SPSU) was a public, co-educational, state university in Marietta, Georgia, United States approximately northwest of downtown Atlanta. Until 2015, it was an independe ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Heatherington, Dale 1948 births American computer scientists American software engineers American telecommunications engineers Living people