Ward Christensen, BBS Inventor and Architect of Our Online Age, Dies At Age 78 (arstechnica.com) 41
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Friday, Ward Christensen, co-inventor of the computer bulletin board system (BBS), died at age 78 in Rolling Meadows, Illinois. 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. 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 died peacefully in his home. The cause of death has not yet been announced.
Pior 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.
"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 died peacefully in his home. The cause of death has not yet been announced.
Pior 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.
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So waiting for this post. It's been a year now!
RIP Creimer, RIP Ward
If you haven't seen his bit in the BBS Documentary you should check it out.
Dang (Score:5, Interesting)
Xmodem. That takes me back. I developed decent social skills because of BBSs.
Re:Dang (Score:4, Interesting)
Years later, I started using Linux when I downloaded SLS Linux from a BBS at a blazing 19,200 bps.
Re:Dang [To be young again...] (Score:2)
Boy the memories you triggered...
My first box was a Kaypro. I was a minor hacker in those days, but the REAL hacker Paul Lupa reversed the serial printer port so he could input the source of Modem 7. Pretty sure that was the version he used. It was in assembly and so large that he had to do it in two pieces. Then he joined the pieces, guessed at a suitable port (or interrupt?) number and assembled the working code, which he then used to download a more capable file transfer program. After that we were off t
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My first job after high school was writing and managing a simple inventory database and payroll system on a Kaypro with CP/M.
Re:Dang (Score:4)
Xmodem. That takes me back.
Being a Xennial, I caught the tail end of the whole BBS thing right as home use of the internet was starting to catch on. By the time I got into it, anyone still using Xmodem to transfer files would draw the same kind of ire as today with an EV owner attempting to charge their vehicle all the way up to 100% at a DCFC station. It meant you'd be hogging a dial-up line while your modem was chugging away transmitting files using an extremely inefficient protocol, and some people still kept using it anyway out of habit.
Support for Xmodem hung on way longer than it should've.
Re:Dang (Score:4, Informative)
A lot of boot loaders for embedded hardware required XMODEM for firmware uploads so I was quite happy that the XMODEM support kept on going for longer - until I wrote my own implementation, that is. It is very easy to implement and YMODEM basically sits on top of it. IIRC even ZMODEM is basically the same protocol underneath, just with larger packets and a sliding window.
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ZMODEM also had accurate, constantly estimated file transfer time. A function Microsoft has yet to figure out. (FFS Microsoft, just steal ZMODEM's algorithm. Like y'all stole BSDs TCP stack.)
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File time estimates for direct modem-to-modem transfers are mostly accurate because latency is mostly predictable. Even then, floppy drive read/writes would throw off the calculation. That will also happen today if your storage/retrieval system is slow.
TCP/IP file transfers (especially over the Internet) are largely unpredictable because Internet latency is not predictable, and TCP/IP is dynamically adaptive, so changing network conditions will cause the transfer to dynamically speed up and slow down. It is
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ZMODEM is basically the same protocol underneath, just with larger packets and a sliding window.
Zmodem did not have a sliding window. It basically just never sent anything else except NAKs - if the receiver encountered an error, it told the sender to restart at offset X. Sliding window would have to have been ridiculously large for long-distance connections, and furthermore, sometimes you had asymmetric links (think US Robotics HST, which was 9600+ in one direction, but only 450 bps the other).
Re: Dang (Score:2)
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Xmodem. That takes me back. I developed decent social skills because of BBSs.
BBSs taught me to type fast, write well, and use capitalization and punctuation. That's essential at 10 years old when you want people to take you seriously. 40 years later and I will not drop a post on Slack unless it's written properly, something lacking in my younger co-workers.
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I loved dialing up BBS and even ran one for a time.
Moving to Zmodem was life-changing.
Also, when v.42bis added data compression things got even better.
Then, in college, where we had direct serial connections to the computer center, I had to go back to Kermit to overcome the noisy lines.
Ward's work was a direct predecessor of /. (Score:3)
Ward was a classy and innovative man, and will be missed.
Randy Suess was also a man.
RIP now that NO CARRIER got him (Score:5, Insightful)
Now that NO CARRIER got him may he rest in peace.
BBS were my first online forays, and I ran my own fidonet-connected bbs for years, and when the internet dried that well, i ran a point. Until there was no point.
Many fond memories. Godspeed, Mr. Christensen.
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BBS were my first online forays
Yup, hits me right in the adolescenthood. I still remember when my friends and I used to trade and comment on various MOD (as in the Amiga 4 channel song format) files we'd find on various BBSes. Somehow, back then that all seemed more impressive than how today you can ask ChatGPT to write a song and have Suno sing it.
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Now that takes me back... I actually started to write my own BBS software back in the day, similar to Maximus, but free and open source, but broke it off in the late 1990s since there is no point anymore, and a couple of years later Maximus was open sourced anyway.
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I hope you have triggered an old joke war for the old times. My favorite entry:
<YIP><YIP><YIP><YIP><YIP><YIP><YIP>
BANG
NO TERRIER
Re:He sounds like a great man... (Score:4, Funny)
Well okay, but what the story neglected to mention was - he was also Satoshi Yakamoto.
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Damn autocorrect. Nakamoto.
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His contributions were significant, but I don't think they compare to the contributions from the gang responsible for developing the ARPANET, Bob Metcalf (Ethernet), or Tim Berners-Lee (WWW) etc...
And you found it necessary to point this out in a post about the man's death.
The BBS scene, and the ARPANET were separate at that time. APRANET was all money and academia and government, and BBS was all dialup point-to-point hobbyist stuff. Apples and oranges.
One thing they both had in common back then -- neither had been tainted by the corporate cancer.
Now, things are different. I yearn from the simplicity of BBS, and not the mirrors-and-neon shininess of the fake, commercialized Internet.
Damn (Score:3)
File transfer is now a commodity scp or rsync away. It's a single line in your script, but it wasn't always.
One of the neat things about xmodem is it was one of my earliest exposures to completely different senders and receivers, getting along thank to an implementation of the same protocol. You would have never guessed my lameass 8-bit machine would be downloading a file from you!
XMODEM ZMODEM KERMIT CKermit - RIP (Score:1)
The move from serial (RS232C) connections to MODEMs (now "modems") to services allowing multiple communication paths ("rooms") was long, and may he rest in peace.
E
BBS discussion were fun and DL's were great (Score:2)
his bss still runs today (Score:1)
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Thanks for the porn. (Score:1)
This guy made it possible for millions of teenagers to get the kinds of wild porn not hidden in our fatherâ(TM)s sock drawers. I wouldnâ(TM)t have ever thought someone would suck off a horse if Wardâ(TM)s work hadnâ(TM)t made downloading images easy.
A Jewel of an Engineer (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems right that since I announced the BBS Documentary production on Slashdot, I should also take the time to give testimony to one of its primary interviewees that took it from side fun project to meaningful historical work.
My goal had been to do a documentary on the BBS Experience, working from interviews with flexible friends and nearby folks, and then work up to the "Big Ones", the names who had been in my teenage mind when I ran a BBS, like Ward Christensen, Chuck Forsberg, Randy Suess, and others. But then I had someone from Chicago checking in to make sure I wasn't going to skip over the important parts the midwest had told in the story. So it was that a month into production, barely nailing down how I would fly post 9/11 with a studio worth of equipment, that I found myself at CACHE (Chicago Area Computer Hobbyist Exchange) and meeting Ward himself.
They say "Never meet your heroes." I think it's more accurate to say "Have the best heroes" or "Be the kind of person a hero would want to meet." Ward was warm, friendly, humble, and very, VERY accomodating to a first-time filmmaker. I appreciated, fundamentally, the boost that he gave me and my work, knowing I was sitting on hours of footage from The Guy.
There were many other The Guy and The Lady and The Groups for BBS: The Documentary, but Ward's humble-ness about his creation and what it did to the world was what made sure I never overhyped or added layers of drama on the work. Ward was amazing and I'll miss him.
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Some of the old timers are really amazing to engage with. A friend of mine who recently started running a Traveller campaign emailed its creator with a question about a rule detail, and got a very friendly, informative answer. They've since corresponded on other aspects of the game. I had a similar experience with one of the producers of a fantastic stage satire of Star Trek that I saw back in the 90s (which unfortunately was shut down by Paramount's lawyers). I think the important thing is just to be respe
Hits me in my childhood (Score:1)
I absolutely fell in love with BBSes when I was in 9th or 10th grade. We had a Tandy 1000 that my dad used for his consulting business, and I would use it for school and games. He had a modem for uploading things to one of his clients, and I subsequently discovered how to use a terminal program to dial into BBSes.
I still remember all the fun I had with messages, online door games, and downloading shareware games. It wasn't long before I found Minihost and tried to start my own BBS on our dual-360k-floppy sy
Total Fanboy (Score:2)
Circa 1988 I was getting into raytracing with the newly ported-to-x86 DKBTrace, later called POV-Ray, and for support I hung out on SIGGRAPH, the computer graphics forum on CompuServe (kids, ask grandpa about CompuServe. It was nifty!)
I read a post from a user also looking for advice on the subject, and I was surprised to see the name: Ward Christensen. I asked him "Are you THE Ward Christensen, father of XModem???" He was genuinely surprised that anyone had heard of him, much less was a fan.
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72310,272 right here. ;-)
Wrote my own BBS back in the 80s (Score:2)
The 80s saw the dawn of BBSes, the precursors of the Internet. I wrote my own in the late 80s in Turbo Pascal - Tomb of the Unknown Modem - which I ran for several years in Portland, OR. It had about 200 registered users and 20 or 30 regulars. I only knew a couple of them personally. It was divided into 10 sub-boards, which included a joke board, play-by-post D&D and Robotech campaigns, and an adults-only "hot tub". It also had a choose-your-own-adventure style game I wrote called "Toddler Terror". I pu
Cheers to a silent Hero (Score:2)
Hats off to a Silent Hero of the Internet revolution. And to all the others out there that did amazing stuff no one knows about.
More than that (Score:2)
As a C-Net Commodore 64 BBS Sysop from â85 forward, I must tip my hat to this man. However, Punter Protocol was far superior to XMODEM! ;)
Yeah. It doesnâ(TM)t matter at all these days. Other than to point out that we had options. Thatâ(TM)s my message.
PP Rocks!
A Hacker's Hacker (Score:2)
Ward was ALWAYS inventing new tools, and new ways to do things. He was a Hacker's Hacker.
One night, I was visiting, and downstairs was "The Ward Board", his personal BBS. He had the console running on an old 9" Sony Monitor, he was watching someone logged in, and decided to throw a toggle switch to take the BBS offline. He said "Oh.... he's a Twit".... and I asked what a Twit was... and he told me it's not a nice person. Decades later, along comes Twitter... ;-)
Ward entered the "shortest usable program" c