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.
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.
Ward Christensen in 2002 being interviewed by Jason Scott for BBS: The Documentary.
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."
According to my notes, it went live shortly after midnight on Oct 13, 1994. We sat in the conference room in the dark and listened to different sound effects fired for each different platform that was downloaded. At some point late that night I wandered off and wrote the first version of the page that loaded when you pressed the
in the toolbar. (A couple days later, Jim Clark would go ballistic in a company-wide email because I had included a link to Bianca's Smut Shack.)
For those of you who are unaware of these finer details, 0.9 was the first release of the Netscape browser (which begat Firefox) available to the general public. This beta release was an unannounced surprise. Prior to this, everyone assumed that what we were doing was going to be a standard for-sale product where you sent off your $35 and then some time later got a disc in the mail with a license key. That we just said, "Here's our FTP site, come get it, go crazy" was, at the time, shocking to people.
These anniversaries keep piling up, so I don't really have a lot to add, but check my NSCP tag or the Previouslies for more, particularly the links in this one.
I'd still like to find a way to run a mid-90s vintage Unix version of the browser under emulation on an M1 Mac. I asked about that a while back but was never able to Make It Go.
Has your dentist ever told you that it's recommended to get routine dental X-rays every year? My (former) dentist's office did this year—in writing, even. And they claimed that the recommendation came from the American Dental Association.
It's a common refrain from dentists, but it's false. The American Dental Association does not recommend annual routine X-rays. And this is not new; it's been that way for well over a decade.
The association's guidelines from 2012 recommended that adults who don't have an increased risk of dental caries (myself included) need only bitewing X-rays of the back teeth every two to three years. Even people with a higher risk of caries can go as long as 18 months between bitewings. The guidelines also note that X-rays should not be preemptively used to look for problems: "Radiographic screening for the purpose of detecting disease before clinical examination should not be performed," the guidelines read. In other words, dentists are supposed to examine your teeth before they take any X-rays.
On October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus stumbled upon Hispaniola. Part of the revolution he wrought was transforming work in the Americas, because what he wanted and how he treated the Taino there would be repeated throughout the Americas by every European colonial power. What he wanted was goods and how he treated the people living there was slavery backed with violence. Work and genocide are very much related here.
First, Columbus was both a smart guy and an idiot at the same time. In case anyone still thinks this, everyone knew the world was round. The idea that everyone thought the world was flat and Columbus was this genius who thought it was round was complete bullshit made up by Washington Irving in the early 19th century to create his beloved American mythology. The Greeks had more or less figured out the circumference of the Earth a long time ago. Their predictions about the Earth’s size were pretty close to accurate too. It’s just that everyone thought there was nothing out there between Europe and Asia. Columbus wasn’t some genius. He had his own personal calculations of the planet’s size that claimed the Greeks were wrong and the Earth was in fact much smaller. So he convinced the King and Queen of Spain to fund a trip–after all, what did they have to lose? If Columbus died, who cares? Then of course he gets to Hispaniola, sees nothing there that has anything to do with what the Spanish expected due to the goods they got through Muslim middlemen from southeast Asia, and remained determined that this was the Spice Islands by God. Even though everyone else was like, wait a minute, this is something new.
I still remember when I first found out that the Columbus thought the world round thing was a myth, which was my senior year of college when a professor discussed it. I was outraged at being lied to my whole life and I don’t think I’ve ever fully recovered.
Anyway, on the first voyage, Columbus took maybe two dozen Tainos back to Spain. Were they slaves? Well, they weren’t really conceptualized as such. They were examples, evidence. Some may have chosen to go. It was after all a life-changing experience for everyone involved and some may have desired to see what all this was about. But some were captured too. One man volunteered to go when his wife and children were captured. It’s certainly not a good story, but the true horrors were to come.
It’s really the second voyage in 1493 that things get awful. He had left some men in Hispanola. He went back to Spain and by the time he returned on the second voyage, all the men he had left were dead, killed by Tainos after they argued over gold and then stole indigenous women as sex slaves. Finally, a Taino leader named Canoabo led forces to kill the rest of the Spanish. Columbus’ men then captured Canoabo and sent him to Spain. He died on the voyage. Columbus routinely used torture and mutilation in governing Hispanola, with cutting off ears and noses a popular punishment.
By this time, Columbus saw himself as an outright slave trader. This was the future for European wealth. Columbus had seen the new fort in Guinea the Portuguese had constructed that already sold some slaves, though it would be a long time before this became the infamous slave trade. But in February 1495, he sent 550 Taino and other peoples from the islands he explored on a ship back to Spain for that nation’s slave markets. Already, some were being used as sex slaves, a side to slavery we still don’t talk about often enough. We know this from the diaries of some of the officers Columbus had brought along who enslaved young Carib girls for sex. In fact, those 550 slaves were just a fraction of the people Columbus and his men had captured, at least 1,600. The reverse Middle Passage was pretty well as brutal as the more infamous one from Africa to the Americas later. About 200 of the people died on the voyage to Spain.
Columbus proposed to turn Hispanola into the next Guinea, the center of slavery. But Ferdinand and Isbella were not interested in this. In fact, while they had approved the sale of the surviving Natives when they arrived in Spain, four days later, they changed their minds and issued a counter-order. There were theological and spiritual considerations to be made. What were these people? Did they have souls? The Spanish had a long slavery tradition, but generally that was under the idea of enslaving enemies at war. Were these indigenous people enemies? So they created a body of theologians and lawyers to work all this out. They took a full five years to come up with an answering, not until 1500. We also don’t know the answer–the document no longer exists. But we do know Queen Isabella particularly came out against Native slavery. When Columbus sent another group of Indians to Spain as slaves in 1499, she exploded in rage, stating “Who is this Columbus who dares to give out my vassals as slaves?” We also know that in 1500, she gave a bunch of Indians the choice to go back and almost without exception, they did.
But see, there’s another side to this. What the Spanish really needed was not more slaves in the Spanish markets. They needed workers in the islands to develop them for Spanish needs. This is what Columbus could not understand (well, he couldn’t understand a lot of things). The Spanish wanted gold a lot more than they wanted slaves in Spain. Columbus wanted that too. There was some in Hispanola and Native slavery there, well that the Crown was fine with, to the extent that they even knew any real details about it. The goldfields of Cibao were bad, forcing indigenous people to dive for pearls off the coast was even more deadly. Of course, later, the real gold and silver despots were uncovered in Mexico and Peru. Indigenous people were enslaved there too. But as the Spanish colonies grew, so did the need for labor, beyond what local enslavement could provide. So the answer was Africans. While Native people died quickly, the market opened up for Africans. A bit later, the priest Barolomé de las Casas decried the enslavement and horrible treatment of indigenous people in Mexico and was brave in his stance, but he openly welcomed the African slave trade as the only reasonable arrangement for Spanish power in the New World. After all, he was just as much an agent of Spanish empire as anyone else.
Thus began a long, horrible, and still continuing enslavement of people of color by Europeans in the Americas.
Ring of Fire over Easter Island
The second solar eclipse
of 2024 began in the Pacific.
On October 2nd the Moon's shadow swept from
west to east, with an
annular eclipse visible
along a narrow antumbral shadow path tracking mostly over ocean,
making its only major landfall
near the southern tip of South America,
and then ending in the southern Atlantic.
The dramatic total annular eclipse phase
is known to some as a
ring of fire.
Also tracking across islands in the southern Pacific, the Moon's
antumbral shadow grazed Easter Island allowing
denizens to follow
all phases of the annular eclipse.
Framed by
palm tree leaves this clear island view
is a stack of two images, one taken with and one taken without
a solar filter near the
moment of the maximum annular phase.
The New Moon's silhouette
appears just off center, though still
engulfed by the bright disk of the active Sun.
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