Ward Christensen (1945-2024)

October 20, 2024 7:38 AM

+++ATH0: Ward Christensen, co-inventor of the computer bulletin board system (BBS), has died at the age of 78. Christensen, along with Randy Suess, created the first BBS in Chicago in 1978, leading to an important cultural era of digital community-building that presaged much of our online world today.

Christensen and Suess developed the software behind CBBS to allow Chicago Area Computer Hobbyists' Exchange (CACHE) members to exchange data. The concept was simple, at least in retrospect. The computer running the BBS software allowed users to connect, using dial-up at the time, and download and upload software and data. This data might be software or messages – some private, some public – but it predated the modern World Wide Web by decades.

BBS The Documentary by Jason Scott covers the history of these early days.

Ward was also the inventor of the XMODEM protocol, an early file transfer method that is still used by many computer systems today. Christensen's partner in CBBS, Randy Suess, passed away in 2019.

posted by JoeZydeco (32 comments total)

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posted by doctornemo at 7:53 AM on October 20

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posted by gc at 8:08 AM on October 20

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posted by Kattullus at 8:14 AM on October 20

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posted by tonycpsu at 8:15 AM on October 20

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I still occasionally run into embedded systems that save/load/upgrade via serial and XMODEM. There are better protocols, but it's very simple and will get the data through under most conditions.
posted by scruss at 8:19 AM on October 20 [3 favorites]

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posted by jim in austin at 8:32 AM on October 20

Dang. I discovered the Twin Cities' Citadel-86 BBS scene at a particularly difficult time in my high school life in either 1991 or 92. It was a lifeline in very challenging times. I know there was USENET out there, too, but it's really wild to think of how much online culture we take for granted came out of single line dial up BBS'es, and how much of that history is sitting on old hard drives somewhere in the very best case scenario, and more likely just gets thrown away.

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posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 8:33 AM on October 20 [7 favorites]

He encountered great difficulty making it to the cemetery, because he had~||-.~~~

NO CARRIER

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posted by zaixfeep at 8:33 AM on October 20 [8 favorites]

I ran a BBS on an Atari 400 with a 300 baud modem in '81 or '82. The modem didn't have ring detection so I put a couple wires into the AT&T leased phone that would contact when the physical ringer clapper struck the bells; these fed into the joystick port on the Atari, signalling a joybutton press, telling the software I wrote (in Atari BASIC) to pick up the line. 300 baud was so slow there were parts of the BBS that were dedicated to animated art where cursor controls could write and overwrite special characters in real time.
posted by seanmpuckett at 8:37 AM on October 20 [12 favorites]

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posted by dr_dank at 8:42 AM on October 20

RIP; you changed my life.
posted by praemunire at 9:05 AM on October 20 [2 favorites]

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posted by evilmonk at 9:16 AM on October 20

The comments on the Ars Technica story are worth a read. Definitely unlocked some memories about the local BBS scenes and how they’d have a whole social aspect of meetups, picnics, and the like. One board in the Long Island scene (I want to say Storm System or Utopia Tech) would have a monthly gathering at South Bay diner, an interesting cross-section of people that I wouldn’t have met otherwise as a teen.
posted by dr_dank at 9:20 AM on October 20 [3 favorites]

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posted by joedan at 9:31 AM on October 20

First found BBSes in 1992 when I bought a modem from my uncle, with which he gave me a printout of BBS phone numbers that he got from one of his employees; I met my first wife through the local BBS scene -- absolutely not joking, my handle was scarecrow, her handle was fire, which should have been a clue about how our marriage went -- and we ran a BBS from about 1996 - 1998, at the very tail end of when BBSes were relevant (although one of the local ones went Telnet and was still accessible into the 2000s).

So, we could see what users were doing when they logged in, and one day we saw somebody dialing in, typing the various usernames of both ourselves and popular users and getting failed password attempts until it disconnected them, and then they'd dial in and try again; of course, with caller ID we could identify where the 'hacker' was calling from, and in contacting a variety of local law enforcement in hopes of finding someone who even sort of knew what a 'hacker' was, settled on the county sheriff, who went and had a talk with the kid and his parents (the kid had been banned/blocked for bad behavior). The sheriff declined to press any charges, described the kid as "not the sharpest knife in the drawer", and we never heard from him again.

Our BBS started out running on whatever spare PC hardware we had, until at the job I was working at I was poking around open fileshares on servers and found the install disks for Microsoft NT 3.51, which was the absolute greatest software for multitasking DOS programs. After a little piracy, on a 486DX2-66 it could run the BBS on phone line 2 and we could still do other stuff on the computer, including dialling out on phone line 1. We finally shut down when we literally only had one user regularly dialling in, maybe once a week, and decided it wasn't worth it any more.

I still have my LoRD license key written on a post-it somewhere around here.

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posted by AzraelBrown at 9:31 AM on October 20 [7 favorites]

I was fortunate enough to meet Ward at a CBBS "reunion" party once. Randy still had that BBS spirit and was assembling early LAN parties at a local pizza joint. Had to chuckle when I saw the looks on the employees' faces when everyone started stringing 10BaseT cable all around the dining room. This was before WiFi and we all were playing Quake on desktop PCs, stuffed into the dining booths.

I'll also repeat a link to Jessamyn's excellent post here if you want to find smaller special-interest forums that are continuing the BBS ethos. Facebook didn't kill us all.

Thank you, Ward.

. NO CARRIER
posted by JoeZydeco at 9:42 AM on October 20 [5 favorites]

ATDT6082334828. Thanks, Ward, and thanks to Raist and Bee.

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posted by graphweaver at 9:43 AM on October 20

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posted by neonamber at 9:50 AM on October 20

I have never done the thing of posting a single dot in response to posts like this but here I was tempted.

I discovered BBS culture in 1985 while on hiatus from college. It was a social lifeline for a lonely nerd who'd already had a taste of Life Online with the PLATO CAI system.

78 is a pretty good run. He made a lot of people's lives a lot better than they might have been, were it not for him.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 9:54 AM on October 20 [2 favorites]

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posted by jpziller at 10:05 AM on October 20

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posted by HearHere at 10:12 AM on October 20

So the history of the internet has been profoundly affected by at least two Wards (the other one I know of being Ward Cunningham, inventor of the wiki).
posted by trig at 10:15 AM on October 20 [2 favorites]

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posted by gwint at 10:33 AM on October 20

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posted by evilDoug at 11:13 AM on October 20

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posted by kitten kaboodle at 11:16 AM on October 20

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posted by briank at 11:32 AM on October 20

I first found out about BBSes from a front-page article in the Chicago Reader around that time; their archive doesn't seem to go back that far, unfortunately, but I wonder if he was involved in the story somehow.
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:07 PM on October 20 [1 favorite]

I met Mrs. Example on a BBS back in the 90s. My life would have been very different.

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posted by Mr. Bad Example at 12:23 PM on October 20 [3 favorites]

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posted by Spike Glee at 12:55 PM on October 20

Surely I must have a pic or two of Ward around somewhere - here's one from the CBBS anniversary in 2005.

And here's one of his partner-in-crime Randy who we lost in 2019.
posted by art.bikes at 1:28 PM on October 20

GNU Ward Christensen
posted by The otter lady at 1:50 PM on October 20

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posted by Mitheral at 1:56 PM on October 20