Ward Christensen, BBS Inventor and Architect of Our Online Age, Dies At Age 78

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.

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