Ward Christensen has died (of BBS and XMODEM fame)

I made the BBS Documentary (www.bbsdocumentary.com).

My goal had been to do a documentary on the BBS Experience, working from interviews with flexible friends and nearby folks, and then work up to the "Big Ones", the names who had been in my teenage mind when I ran a BBS, like Ward Christensen, Chuck Forsberg, Randy Suess, and others. But then I had someone from Chicago checking in to make sure I wasn't going to skip over the important parts the midwest had told in the story. So it was that a month into production, barely nailing down how I would fly post 9/11 with a studio worth of equipment, that I found myself at CACHE (Chicago Area Computer Hobbyist Exchange) and meeting Ward himself.

They say "Never meet your heroes." I think it's more accurate to say "Have the best heroes" or "Be the kind of person a hero would want to meet." Ward was warm, friendly, humble, and very, VERY accomodating to a first-time filmmaker. I appreciated, fundamentally, the boost that he gave me and my work, knowing I was sitting on hours of footage from The Guy.

There were many other The Guy and The Lady and The Groups for BBS: The Documentary, but Ward's humble-ness about his creation and what it did to the world was what made sure I never overhyped or added layers of drama on the work. Ward was amazing and I'll miss him.

BBSes was such a huge part of being into computers in the 80s and 90s.

I really wish this culture could be understood by future generations. Yes, we have the BBS Documentary movie but we need so much more. Everything non-US is underdocumented, and all the subcultures such as the eLiTe scene, the demo scene, the vision impaired stuff, all of that risks being forgotten with time.

RIP.

My first paid programming gig ($20) was implementing the XMODEM checksum in 6502 assembly for a BBS sysop who had bought an early 1200 baud modem, only to find that his Atari BASIC BBS software was computing the checksum so slowly that it still created slowdowns in file transfers and needed a USR() that could compute it faster.

I learned a lot about protocols and algorithms from that exercise (now trivially simple, but wasn't for me at the time).

BBSs were a huge part of my life in the 90s. I wanted teenagers of today to be able to feel the same thrill of socializing like we did back then. BBSs are not as good as the Internet, obviously, but there are no full fidelity replacements for BBSs nowadays - if you were there, you get it.

Well, this isn't how I expected to learn of his passing. All of the people I would ask for confirmation are gone, as our computer user group members have aged out.

Ward was a first principles thinker. Lately he was very active with Blinkies, helping folks learn to solder and make their own electronics.

A friend who works in embedded systems pointed out that XMODEM protocol communication is used everywhere in embedded; it may be that the protocol is more widely shipped now than it has been in the past!

Many Cisco, Adtran, Juniper etc switches and routers have it in their firmware also.

> Christensen, along with partner Randy Suess,[2] members of the Chicago Area Computer Hobbyists' Exchange (CACHE), started development 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.[3][4][5]

I feel like many of us programmers here could do with a blizzard, weeks without work to just build things. If you're like me, so often you're so busy it's hard to ever stop and just build things for fun, for play.

BBSes were a very big part of my early computer days. I learned real programming in high school teaching myself and hacking on BBS source code in Pascal. Not knowing that I would soon be on the Internet, one of the reasons I went to university in a city was so that there would be local BBSes. All of that had huge impact on my life and I’m just one small example. I and many others owe huge thanks to Ward Christensen and all those who carried on what he started.

I remember when Chuck Forsberg died, the author of YMODEM, nearly 10 years ago now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10593617

The XYZ Modems: https://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~rootd/catdoc/guide/TheGuide_226.ht...

As far as I can recall, it didn't have a sliding window, once protocols, like kermit, added sliding windows the speed jumped a huge amount.

At the ONE BBSCON 1994 keynote and conference opening, there was an exercise where all sysops stood, and those running a BBS for less than a year sat down, then less than 2, and so on - until only Ward Christensen was left standing. I recall briefly meeting him, that he was humble, yet very proud of what BBSes had become. May he rest in peace.

I remember riding my bicycle over to the local sysop's place to pay $5 cash for my BBS account as a young teen. Looking back this was probably ill advised and risky. Turned out the sysop was only a couple of years older than me.

Oh, darn.

I had an online text chat with him on Compuserve back in the 80's; he was surprised anyone knew who he was. Nice guy.

If you haven't watched the BBS Documentary [1], you absolutely should. It's a truly special documentary, made by hackers for hackers.

For someone like me who grew up in that era, in a small town in a remote country, having access to BBSes was life-changing. It gave me a window to the world that I otherwise wouldn't have had.

RIP Ward; thank you for everything you did.

[1] Recent discussions:

"BBS: The Documentary (2005)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38746221 (Dec 2023, 185 points, 65 comments)

"Enjoyed Jason Scott’s BBS documentary" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31740247 (Jun 2022, 115 points, 39 comments)

An amazing guy, and not much of an attention seeker. That he stayed at IBM all his productive work life (1968-2012) says something, especially as "His last position with IBM was field technical sales specialist."

It was always Ward Christensen protocol before people began calling it Xmodem protocol. That is why everybody knew his name.

RIP Ward.

Oh man, now there's a name I have not heard of since I was a child in the BBS scene in the 80s and 90s. My father had chats with him while getting his BBS software up and running, playing with the Ward Christensen (yes it was named after him first before being XMODEM) protocol.

RIP to the man that made BBSing a bit faster for my attention-lacking self.

Does anyone have an actual notice or obituary other than an anonymous Wikipedia edit? I'd like to check in with some of the CBBS people I know, but having an actual obit would be good.

Adding my name to the list of people greatly impacted by BBSs in the 80's and forward. I became good friends with some locals that ran a WWIV board. I'm still friends with them, and a few others that used their BBS, to this day. My favorite though was TProBBS that incorporated a D&D style game. I remember there was an option to buy and upgrade a ship, too. Then you could explore the ocean looking for treasure and sea monsters and sometimes battle others. You could upgrade your "bank" for better security, which hardly anyone did. I played a rogue character and was able to steal a lot of money from others before they realized how important it was to upgrade your security systems. Fun times. Good memories.

The link below is to a PDF of an article penned by Ward and Randy Suess for the Nov. 1978 issue of Byte, called "Hobbyist Computerized Bulletin Board". Details their development and functions. [0] Followed by a link to the 2019 NYT obit for Seuss. [1]

[0] http://vintagecomputer.net/cisc367/byte%20nov%201978%20compu... (pp 150-157)

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/technology/randy-suess-de...

That’s a name I remember from my youth. I became pretty interested in all these curiously named file transfer protocols (Xmodem, Zmodem, Kermit, bimodem, etc.) and learned what I could from poring over microfiche archives of magazines and papers at the local library.

BBSes were a big part of my pre-teen years, before dial up internet access became available in my area. Really difficult to explain to younger folks what it was like. XMODEM was the file transfer protocol for more than a decade, as I recall.

LEGEND! I remember pouring over the xmodem doc's back in the day. Thank you sir, without your work my life would have been a much experience.

He was a pioneer and a public benefactor. Our connected world would be unthinkable without him.

Maybe HN should carry a black banner today.

@dang this would seem to be worthy of a black banner day?

"BBS: The Documenary" by Jason Scott: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7nj3G6Jpv2G6Gp6NvN1k...

Well worth watching.

"If you haven't watched the BBS Documentary [1], you absolutely should. It's a truly special documentary, made by hackers for hackers."

it's not made by hackers for hackers. it's about the bbs community

Bummer. Not sure it's possible to overstate the impact BBSs had on me and my life between 1983-1997 (and all the things downstream of that). Certainly used a whole lot o' Xmodem initially.

Also see: https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren/113300835222615...

BBS culture was a big part of my teen years. And Ward and his code played a huge part in that. XMODEM FTW. RIP.

Dying of BBS and XMODEM fame sounds painful.

Can dang or another mod move the parenthetical modifier?

One minute of

NO CARRIER

NO CARRIER

in the 90's, Xmodem seemed to be a inferior protocol compared to Z-Modem and HS-Link.