Ward Christensen, inventer of XMODEM and co-inventer of the BBS, has died
Not much I can say, .Story here"
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.
RIP, man who's code I used a lot back in the day.
Ward Christensen, BBS Inventor and Architect of Our Online Age, Dies at Age 78
Ward Christensen, BBS inventor and architect of our online age, dies at age 78:
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.
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
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.
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.
[...] "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."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by pTamok on Tuesday October 15 2024, @06:33AM (9 children)
Some people like to solve problems.
Not all of the people who like to solve problems feel the urge to monetise their work. We are all the richer for it.
I generally like people like Ward Christensen. They contribute to making the world a nice place to live in.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Tuesday October 15 2024, @03:37PM (8 children)
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Tork on Tuesday October 15 2024, @04:01PM (7 children)
Wanna hear something kinda wild? Back in my BBS days I useta hang out at a community college BBS because it was well funded and had multiple phone lines in. It's THE one you went to in my area if you actually wanted to chat with someone in real time, most BBSs only had one or two lines so that was never happening. One day a dude opened a random chat with me and we talked for a bit. We ended up doing a ... ahem.. shareware exchange from time to time. I ended up professionally using a descendent of that software a few years later!
Before today I could not have named Ward Christensen or told anyone why he was important, but my life got a 'happily ever after' epilogue from his contributions to society. Seriously, had I not had that random encounter on a BBS there's a very real chance I wouldn't be sitting where I am now. Best wishes to his family and loved ones.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday October 15 2024, @05:56PM (6 children)
My BBS days ran from 1984 through about 1986, and "shareware parties" - often hosted at churches - were a significant part of that culture, in addition to over-the-wire exchanges. At the time, more than once I encountered a new group's member who felt that me uploading a copyrighted work to him via modem somehow proved that I wasn't a cop out to bust them - it was a sort of initiation rite into the group - which actually did their high bandwidth exchanges by copying floppies in face-to-face bring your stuff parties where everyone generally ended up with the same set of worthwhile software. In addition to the statute of limitations, it should be mentioned that I was also a minor during most of these meetings, meetings in the later year were more restaurant party room group social things - pretty broad mix of characters (90%+ male) from 12 to 70 years old would show up, by that time most of us already had more software than we could realistically use so the copying wasn't "a thing" anymore.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday October 15 2024, @07:48PM (1 child)
Having been there / done that about the same era it's important to point out to the noobs that this was long before pdf scans of manuals or the internet.
So, you might have a copy of DBASE-III or Turbo C compiler, but if you have no idea how to use it, the software is not terribly useful.
This was the genesis IMHO of shovelware computer books where the book might have been a low-quality re-interpretation of the official manual, but if the book was a tenth or even a hundredth the price of the official software, that's good enough.
Also, it was a thing back then to check out computer books from the library. "Why are you checking out a book from the library about Turbo Pascal, we don't have Turbo Pascal at home?" "... uh ... we're using it at school." "Oh, OK, good job studying." Now that I'm an adult, I'm sure they knew darn well what was going on LOL, so I look back and laugh.
I also did this exact scenario with WordPerfect5.1 back in the 80s. Software was not exactly user friendly, you could run wp51.exe or wp51.com or whatever it was but you'd have no idea what to do next, a couple years later this made emacs and vi look user friendly because at least they have manpages.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday October 15 2024, @09:36PM
In the late 1990s I had a "Singapore connection" who traveled there and throughout the region regularly. He asked: "Do you need any software?" I said: "AutoCad would be nice." He brought back all the flavors of AutoCad 14, Architectural Desktop etc. etc. he said "for about the cost of a bottle of wine." He also mentioned that if you didn't want your luggage searched by customs at airports of Islamic countries, you should throw a couple of (preferably recent) copies of Playboy / Penthouse on top of your clothes. They open the suitcase, see the magazines, you say "Oh, I'm so sorry, I forgot these are illegal here, of course you must confiscate them..." the gentleman's agreement from that point is that the clothing will not be disturbed and whatever lies beneath is not the concern of the officers.
AutoCad was pretty self explanatory, and being the late 1990s there were some guides online by then too - but I rarely needed them.
I learned Architectural Desktop for my own uses and determined that 14 was what we needed to do a job at work - work went ahead and bought a legit copy of 14 for me to work with, after I had basically taught myself how to use it sufficiently well at home.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday October 15 2024, @07:59PM (3 children)
Whoa a blast from the past, probably haven't thought of this since the 80s. memory unlocked a couple seconds ago... Our public school computer club was mostly for trading warez and I kid you not our primary club fundraiser was the teacher-advisor would sell club members a wide variety of blank floppy disks for all kinds of 80s home computers.
Once in awhile, you'd have some kid ask "well, why would I need a bunch of blank floppy disks?" or "why does the teacher sell so many Atari disks if the school computer lab does not have Atari computers?" and the traders would look at him like he's a moron.
I'm not sure what our club spent its money on that it earned from selling blank floppy disks; probably the teachers personal retirement fund LOL.
I don't think at kid financial levels a kid could give another kid a new floppy and trust them to return it, but if a kid walked in with some game or whatever on a disk you'd pay him with a blank floppy purchased from the club advisor. And it was not socially acceptable not to share.
Obviously the school had either Commodore or Apples so us non-6502 people only went to computer club to trade or to play games on the school computers or just to hang out.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday October 15 2024, @09:43PM (2 children)
Yeah, one of the older guys I met through BBS (and later IRL) was an ex phone company employee turned phreak. He showed me how to do rotary dialing without a dial by tapping the receiver switch - like you're hanging up the line, but releasing it near-instantly and repeating for the number you are dialing, then a pause then the next number etc.
He also showed me somehow to get free long distance and some interesting international dialup numbers. I was playing with that one night when my mom was paying attention, I dialed up a Japanese country code number where the computer that answered showed "Bank Of Japan" on the login prompt (in English - but being an international service, maybe it really was the Bank of Japan). I didn't try to break in or anything, I was just playing around. I quickly forgot all about that, but here recently mom was reminiscing about "back in the day" and apparently dialing up the Bank of Japan on my computer while I was "just" a high school student really impressed her.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by pTamok on Wednesday October 16 2024, @06:21AM (1 child)
Re: dialling abroad/Bank of Japan
I felt the same getting a CERN login screen across the network from our labs in the UK. This was over an X.25 network, not dial-up - but pretty much the same experience, as you needed to know the X.25 endpoint address, but you typed it into the PAD (Packet Assembler/Disassembler) [wikipedia.org] to initiate the connection - much like dialling a phone number.
This was quite some time before WorldWideWeb [wikipedia.org] and NCSA Mosaic [wikipedia.org] hit the world's screens.
It's odd to think that most people have no personal experience of how (tele)communications worked before the general availability of 'the Internet'.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday October 16 2024, @11:46AM
In 1989 I downloaded a patch for the Mentor Graphics CAD/CAM software in our lab, via Kermit over the Internet such as it was.
First trick was to get Kermit working locally, as I recall that took several days of asking around the University IT organization to find someone who knew anything about that. Once I had Kermit running on an Internet connected machine (which was, of course some weird thing that required four more steps to get the patch onto compatible media for transfer to the Apollo systems) it was a relatively simple input of the IP address username and password and file path provided by the vendor to get the patch.
Everyone was quite proud that the main campus was "on the Internet" via a link to our marine science school which had a satellite link to NOAA in Colorado which then was properly meshed into the rest of the Internet via three or four links. I believe the software patch was hosted in Singapore. After a full week of effort it applied successfully, but still didn't fix our bug.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by janrinok on Tuesday October 15 2024, @07:44AM (6 children)
Sometimes I yearn for the simpler times of 50 years ago. When I first encountered a new BBS it was with a sense of adventure to discover what pearls might be available on that site that I could learn from, and perhaps copy to my own computer, and then to chat to others who had similar interests. Waiting for relatively small amounts of data to download at what we thought at the time were actually quite reasonable speeds. I recall using modems that eventually reached 1200bps, 2400bps and so on until I had a modem that could do 56,000 bps. I also remember disliking win-modems with a hatred that I have rarely felt since! And we probably all experienced the sense of frustration when another family member would pick up the phone, usually when one was about 90% of the way through a big download!
The internet today is nothing like that. Commercialisation is the biggest enemy in this regard, and from that all of the elements that commercialisation needs to succeed. Advertisements, personal data being used as a currency, and a sense of competition rather than one of cooperation and discovery.
Sometimes it really does seem like they were the 'good old days' - at least in my hazy memory.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 4, Informative) by janrinok on Tuesday October 15 2024, @07:48AM
I had intended to finish the parent comment with:
Thanks Ward. You, along with Randy, started something that even you could not have imagined. My condolences to your family and friends. RIP.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 15 2024, @03:38PM (2 children)
s/50/40/ maybe?
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Tuesday October 15 2024, @04:04PM (1 child)
I had a computer at home in 1977. I cannot remember the date I made my first BBS connection.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Reziac on Wednesday October 16 2024, @03:06AM
I do, because in 1993 I went to DAK's fire sale and for the princely sum of $5, came home with a 2400 baud modem.
And here I am today, enjoying SN as possibly the modern experience nearest to the old BBS message base.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday October 15 2024, @06:03PM
By the mid 1990s our office had two lines dedicated to digital use. We printed PCBs with LEDs and a switch, when a line was in use the corresponding LED would light, and the switch allowed you to choose which line your modem was on. It wasn't 100% successful at stopping people from knocking each other off, we had about 6 people who used the modem lines an average of maybe 3 hours a week each, but not only having the 2nd line but knowing when a line was in use was a great deal better than having to yell "Is anyone using line 1?" every time you wanted to connect, particularly since the users were scattered in three separate areas, one upstairs.
I forget, but I believe one of those lines was also shared with the FAX machine, which itself still saw an hour or two of use per week.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Tuesday October 15 2024, @08:06PM
Only zmodem had crash recovery IIRC, so once it was popular nobody used anything else.
xmodem did not have a window protocol, it was precisely one fixed length packet at a time either NAK or ACK it. No way to ask it to resume 100K or 50 packets into the file, like zmodem could do.
zmodem could also autostart a download, felt like living in the future the first time that worked.
"Back in the day" you'd do thruput testing and sometimes on a noisy line xmodem was faster because the blocks were slower, although if you had a clean connection then longer blocks from ymodem-1k was faster than xmodem. Eventually around the 14.4 or 28.8 era modems with error detection and correction were baked into the line protocol so you either got no errors or got disconnected.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by namefags_are_jerks on Tuesday October 15 2024, @08:18AM (3 children)
> the first computer bulletin board system ...
In the dial-up world. Amateur Radio had computer-based messaging ("CBM") using computer-controlled teletypes predating that. (If archive.org weren't down, a link to issues of RTTY Journal would go here to prove I'm not a filthy liar..)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by janrinok on Tuesday October 15 2024, @08:39AM
You are correct - and I continued my interest in electronics and radio as a member of the RAF Amateur Radio Club in Gatow, Berlin in the early 70s (DL5YZ - the current owner of that callsign is NOT me).
However, there is no licencing requirement for a BBS which of course made it far more accessible to thousands of hobbyists. The teleprinter still had a role to play because I used one as my keyboard and to print code direct from the sites that I was using at the time. BBSs were far more common in the US than in the UK but the cost of accessing the US by telephone was prohibitive.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday October 15 2024, @07:24PM (1 child)
If you're talking about packet radio BBSes I was there back in the mid to end of the "TNC2" TAPR days and that was all VERY slightly after the phone bbs era started.
So I was using a direct connect 300 baud modem from Radio Shack on a TRS-80 Model III back in '84 for dialup, and compuserve and local BBS. That was back in the day that modem speeds doubled every two years or so, great time to be a kid because my time was free and once 2400 baud modems came out, you could buy a 1200 for like $5 at a ham radio swapfest, which was well within a kids budget. The problem with technological stagnation in computers like the present is kids can't participate; if a 7 year old Chromebook meets most users needs, a kid can't buy one for $5 anymore so they're just frozen out.
I got into packet BBS stuff around '90 or '92 ish era? So a TNC2 was a (then pretty old) Z80 based TNC (kind of like the console of a cisco router... always wondered if whomever thought up the cisco router console was a packet-using ham operator) By '90 or so, PBBS and nodes were pretty well entrenched. Yes the first packet TNCs from the late 70s technically predate the first dial up BBS but I don't think anyone connected a packet TNC to a computer BBS until a few years later. The history of old PBBS stuff seems lost.
From Packet I got involved in JNOS / WNOS / etc all the TCP/IP over AX.25 stuff, then into early linux. Another novel feature of the *NOS software was I could connect to the node network as a node, not just as a node user, so I got topology maps, very cool.
Eventually in the 90s as internet took off, packet died out, but is still around and as of a couple years back is still fun. IIRC the end years of PBBS were mostly spam bulletins, by which I mean endless for-sale posts. Thankfully those people have moved on to ebay. However the spam pushed everyone off so once the spammers left there was nothing left...
The RTTY-journal people did not talk to the PBBS people and I hung out with the PBBS people. Generally speaking the rtty people used vacuum tubes and HF and mechanical tty vs the pbbs people were pretty much microprocessor and transistor and VHF. I only tangentially got involved with HF packet and I'm told that a quarter century later the NET105 people are STILL on the air having fun, but the packet people did not talk to the RTTY people. NET105 was some wild stuff that's for sure.
(Score: 3, Informative) by namefags_are_jerks on Wednesday October 16 2024, @12:13AM
> If you're talking about packet radio BBSes
No I'm not. Hams got RTTY teletypes doing SELCAL going from the 1950s that allowed addressing (emailing..) a particular station using a shift register based circuit to notice a phrase like ("ZCZC 2CJB" msg text "NNNN" - an example of the format: http://www.arrl.org/w1aw-bulletins-archive/ARLD019/2024 [arrl.org] , a 1967 issue of RTTY Journal mentioning a circuit for it: https://www.navy-radio.com/manuals/tty/rtty-journal/1963-1972/PDF/VO15NO5.PDF [navy-radio.com] )
The October 1976 issue of BYTE mentions several times of microcomputers taking over the role, and RTTY Journal was getting editorials on CBM users spamming the primary RTTY frequencies to interact with computer-based messaging (/bulletin board) stations operating automatically -- pointing out that American Hams weren't permitted by their FCC to do that yet; CBMs and PBBS were an early Canadian domain..)
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Rich on Tuesday October 15 2024, @05:42PM
I have an ancient device on my desk that needs some tweaking for some new certifications. It has 128K of RAM, 256K of flash, and an 8K boot EPROM. Software updates are (supposed to be) done through "linear flash" PCMCIA cards. Super convenient: plug in the card, power on, wait, pull out the card when told. However...
These cards are basically one big memory chip (256K flash in my case), or maybe have another small one to tell the host about the big one via a data structure called "CIS". In our case, the "REG" line that switches between the memories is not wired (leaving the risk of a floating select signal), and the cards used don't have the auxiliary chip anyway. This in turn leads to the inability to hotplug the cards into a modern system (and mount it as mtd device), because it can't figure out what they are. 30 years after its inception such cards are hard to get, cost over 100 bucks each, and you have no idea whether a specific one would actually work unless you try them out. Also, writing to them requires odd hard/software combinations that have a PCMCIA slot and particular proprietary kernel drivers for particular proprietary software, that even might choke on ancient license keys (...which actually happened).
The boot EPROM in the devices is socketed, however, and I suggested to the customer that I'd write a new boot EPROM that can accept firmware updates through a serial line. I opted for XMODEM-CRC as the protocol, because it's dead simple and provides all the necessary correction and handshaking. I just keep sending "C" at the start to force CRC or nothing. Also, I made it understand 1K blocks for good performance. Along the way, I did get a reminder, about how little 8K is these days, though, and appreciated what they were able to put into 8K back in the day.
I had that completely new implementation of XMODEM working exactly last Friday. Kind of a worthy send-off for Ward. :)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday October 15 2024, @07:31PM
You can tell when someone started using BBSes heavily "back in the day" by what they call the Tradewars door game, because they renamed that game about every three years on average.
I started before the Tradewars 2001 era although I played it almost every day back in the Tradewars 2002 era. IIRC 2002 had nice ANSI graphics.
For those not around "back in the day" Tradewars was pretty much multi-player text mode "Elite Dangerous" and it had a daily turn budget so you'd log in, goof around until you ran out of turns, then log back in later and play some more. I don't think 3D graphics add much to the feeling of adventure.
Apparently, it's popular online now, can telnet or use a web browser to play Tradewars. Maybe I will again in my infinite spare time.
(Score: 2) by AssCork on Wednesday October 16 2024, @04:14AM
Another legend logs off our local server.
Just popped-out of a tight spot. Came out mostly clean, too.