Ward Christensen, BBS Inventor and Architect of Our Online Age, Dies At Age 78 (arstechnica.com) 16
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.
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 (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: (Score:3)
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.
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:4, 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.
Re: (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
He sounds like a great man... (Score:2)
He sounds like a great man, he had some serious contributions to the way people interacted with each other with technology, and that's great, but the ARPANET had its start in the mid-sixties, a decade before XMODEM and BBS.
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...
Re: (Score:2)
Well okay, but what the story neglected to mention was - he was also Satoshi Yakamoto.
Re: (Score:2)
Damn autocorrect. Nakamoto.
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)