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Ward Christensen, BBS inventor and architect of our online age, dies at age 78
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Ward Christensen, BBS inventor and architect of our online age, dies at age 78

Christensen kick-started online culture by inspiring thousands of hobbyist communities.

Benj Edwards | 83
An image of Ward Christensen in 2002 from Jason Scott's BBS: The Documentary.
An image of Ward Christensen in 2002 from Jason Scott's BBS: The Documentary. Credit: Jason Scott

Ward Christensen, co-inventor of the computer bulletin board system (BBS), has died at age 78 in Rolling Meadows, Illinois. He was found deceased at his home on Friday after friends requested a wellness check. 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.

In the 1980s and 1990s, BBSes introduced many home computer users to multiplayer online gaming, message boards, and online community building in an era before the Internet became widely available to people outside of science and academia. It also gave rise to the shareware gaming scene that led to companies like Epic Games today.

Friends and associates remember Christensen as humble and unassuming, a quiet innovator who never sought the spotlight for his groundbreaking work. Despite creating one of the foundational technologies of the digital age, Christensen maintained a low profile throughout his life, content with his long-standing career at IBM and showing no bitterness or sense of missed opportunity as the Internet age dawned.

"Ward was the quietest, pleasantest, gentlest dude," said BBS: The Documentary creator Jason Scott in a conversation with Ars Technica. Scott documented Christensen's work extensively in a 2002 interview for that project. "He was exactly like he looks in his pictures," he said, "like a groundskeeper who quietly tends the yard."

Tech veteran Lauren Weinstein initially announced news of Christensen's passing on Sunday, and a close friend of Christensen's confirmed to Ars that Christensen likely died at his house overnight between October 10 and October 11. Friends called Police for a wellness check for Christensen on Friday when they had not heard from him as usual. The cause of death has not yet been announced.

Prior to creating the first BBS, Christensen invented XMODEM, a 1977 file transfer protocol that made much of the later BBS world possible by breaking binary files into packets and ensuring that each packet was safely delivered over sometimes unstable and noisy analog telephone lines. It inspired other file transfer protocols that allowed ad-hoc online file sharing to flourish.

Dawn of the BBS

A photo of the original CBBS computer from 1978, taken in 2002 as part of BBS: The Documentary by Jason Scott.
A photo of the original CBBS computer from 1978, taken in 2002 as part of BBS: The Documentary by Jason Scott.
A photo of the original CBBS computer from 1978, taken in 2002 as part of BBS: The Documentary by Jason Scott. Credit: Jason Scott

Christensen and Suess came up with the idea for the first computer bulletin board system during the Great Blizzard of 1978 when they wanted to keep up with their computer club, the Chicago Area Computer Hobbyists’ Exchange (CACHE), when physical travel was difficult. Beginning in January of that year, Suess assembled the hardware, and Christensen wrote the software, called CBBS.

"They finished the bulletin board in two weeks but they called it four because they didn't want people to feel that it was rushed and that it was made up," Scott told Ars. They canonically "finished" the project on February 16, 1978, and later wrote about their achievement in a November 1978 issue of Byte magazine.

Their new system allowed personal computer owners with modems to dial up a dedicated machine and leave messages that others would see later. The BBS concept represented a digital version of a push-pin bulletin board that might flank a grocery store entrance, town hall, or college dorm hallway.

Christensen and Suess openly shared the concept of the BBS, and others began writing their own BBS software. As these programs grew in complexity over time, the often hobbyist-run BBS systems that resulted allowed callers to transfer computer files and play games as well as leave messages.

A low-key giant

Suess died in 2019, and with the passing of both BBS originators, we find ourselves at the symbolic end of an era, although many BBSes still run today. These are typically piped through the Internet instead of a dial-up telephone line.

While Christensen himself was always humble about his role in creating the first BBS, his contributions to the field did not go unrecognized. In 1992, Christensen received two Dvorak Awards, including a lifetime achievement award for "outstanding contributions to PC telecommunications." The following year, the Electronic frontier Foundation honored him with the Pioneer Award.

Professionally, Christensen enjoyed a long and successful career at IBM, where he worked from 1968 until his retirement in 2012. His final position at the company was as a field technical sales specialist.

A still image of Ward Christensen in 2002 being interviewed for BBS: The Documentary.
Ward Christensen in 2002 being interviewed by Jason Scott for BBS: The Documentary.
Ward Christensen in 2002 being interviewed by Jason Scott for BBS: The Documentary. Credit: Jason Scott

But mostly, Christensen kept a low profile.  When visiting online communities in his later years, Ward presented no ostentation, and there was no bragging about having made much of it possible. This amazed Scott, who said, "I was always fascinated that Ward kept a Twitter account, just messing around."

Scott feels like humility, openness, and the spirit of sharing are key legacies that Christensen has left behind.

"It would be like a person who was in a high school band saying, 'Eh, never really got into touring, never really had the urge to record albums or become a rock star,'" Scott said.  "And then later people come and go, 'Oh, you made the first [whatever] in your high school band,' but that sense of being at that locus of history and the fact that his immediate urge was to share all the code everywhere—that's to me what I think people should remember about this guy."

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Benj Edwards Senior AI Reporter
Benj Edwards is Ars Technica's Senior AI Reporter and founder of the site's dedicated AI beat in 2022. He's also a widely-cited tech historian. In his free time, he writes and records music, collects vintage computers, and enjoys nature. He lives in Raleigh, NC.
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I was at the CACHE meeting where Ward and Randy demonstrated their new BBS and XModem on their IMSAI machine. Everyone at the meeting was wowed -- this inspired me to get an acoustic coupler modem (110 baud and close to a week's salary - $100) for my machine.

Both Ward and Randy were always willing to help out CACHE members at the meetings. To them there were no stupid questions, as everyone was learning about what these new microcomputers could be used for.

RIP.
goretsky
Hello,

As a child of Silicon Valley in the 1970s-1980s, I cannot begin to express how formulative those BBSes were to my development. I had met my first girlfriend on a BBS. They fostered online communities, often local in nature, which meant things like meet-ups and pizza parties.

Later on, that particular BBS morphed from a social setting into a business, and I got my first job right out of high school working for its sysop. Although the first day of work was didn't go great, I didn't get fired, either. And one day I took over the BBS as its sysop. The original motherboard is sitting in my basement, even.

While others have explained what BBSes meant to them and allowed them to become, it's important to remember they weren't purely social sites, either. It is difficult to stress just how important BBSes were to early computer companies. They were something akin to the web servers that powered the dot-com boom. BBSes meant software that could be downloaded and installed, technical support without having to wait on the phone in a hold queue, and so much more.

John McAfee was one of the pioneers who distributed his software almost exclusively online (BBSes, walled-garden online services like CompuServe, and the nascent pre-web Internet) and marketed it using a shareware subscription model. It quickly became a success: At one point, Mr. McAfee calculated that each modem line he added to the BBS translated directly into an additional $50,000 in sales, and that figure eventually doubled before ISPs and the web took off.

None of that would have been possible without Mr. Christensen's groundbreaking invention.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky
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