In Honor of Randy and Ward

Randy and Ward Invented the World's First BBS.

Christensen, along with collaborator Randy Suess,[8] members of the Chicago Area Computer Hobbyists' Exchange (CACHE), started development of the first BBS during a blizzard in Chicago, Illinois, and officially established CBBS four weeks later, on February 16, 1978. CACHE members frequently shared programs and had long been discussing some form of file transfer, and the two used the downtime during the blizzard to implement it.[9][10][11] In 1968, Christensen was hired by IBM as a systems engineer in the sales office.[2][12][13][5] Christensen would work for IBM until his retirement in 2012.[5] His last position with IBM was a field technical sales specialist.[12] Christensen was noted for building software tools for his needs. He wrote a cassette-based operating system before floppy disks and hard disks were common.[citation needed] When he lost track of the source code for some programs, he wrote ReSource, an iterative disassembler for the Intel 8080, to help him regenerate the source code.[14][15] In 1977, he wrote XMODEM, a protocol to send computer files over phone lines.[5] Jerry Pournelle wrote in 1983 of a collection of CP/M public-domain software that "probably 50 percent of the really good programs were written by Ward Christensen, a public benefactor."[16] In May 2005, Christensen and Suess were both featured in BBS: The Documentary.[17] Christensen taught soldering techniques, until his death, through Build-a-Blinkie, a non-profit organization that hosts "learn-to-solder" events in the Great Lakes area.[12]

I designed the IO Board they used and helped get it working in their system after a CACHE Club meeting. The article linked describes some of that.









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