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Ward Christensen (of BBS and XMODEM fame) has died

233 pointsposted 13 hours ago

(en.wikipedia.org)

57 Comments

xorcist

10 hours ago

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.

jlundberg

10 hours ago

This is a relevant reflection and I have contemplated collecting BBS memories from my network and strangers. Will be doable once my kids are a bit older and work is a bit leds intense.

Let us stay in touch!

2:206/149 or about in my profile and you’ll find me :)

INTPenis

9 hours ago

It's the standard antithesis of instant gratification culture. We had to actually wait for things to happen, to download, to render, to dial.

Finding something online was a journey and it's often the journey that teaches you more than the destination.

flyinghamster

8 hours ago

Even when you had a networked forum like FidoNet's Echomail (or Usenet, for that matter), it would take time for messages to propagate through the network - and they could sometimes fail to be delivered.

squigz

5 hours ago

Could you elaborate on 'the vision impaired stuff'? I'm visually impaired myself so I'm intrigued.

The demo scene is still alive and kicking, by the by :)

toxic

5 hours ago

One of the more popular DOS-based BBS software platforms of the early 90s was VBBS. It was interoperable with WWIVnet, which is part of why it was popular.

Its author/developer/maintainer was blind. You can imagine how well it worked with screen readers and other accessible technology (which was primitive at the time, and yet somehow better than it is today).

Text on a terminal is much better suited to accessibility technologies, whether readers or braille terminals. BBSes were all about text on terminals, and it was a place where folks who used accessibility tools could choose whether to identify themselves as someone who needed it... and most of the time if they chose not to make it known, none of the other users had any idea.

"You are your own words" is a BBS-ism. For people who are in the deaf community or who used tools because of their sight, being able to be known primarily by their words and not by the way that they used them was absolutely incredible.

(edit: typo)

gausswho

4 hours ago

This is increasingly fascinating.

I want to see a documentary of this in the style of alternating scenes of a) narration over still photos and b) contemporary music alongside silent video of the people behind this community.

axpvms

10 hours ago

I found myself reading through textfiles.com just recently,a really good archive of BBS-era text files.

avg_dev

7 hours ago

here is one nice site http://bbslist.textfiles.com/

jart

6 hours ago

Isn't that just a list of phone numbers?

What are some websites that host the text files, ansi art, and computer programs from old school BBS systems? I would really love to be able to mirror that with wget and explore it in emacs.

Edit: http://www.textfiles.com/directory.html looks good.

avg_dev

5 hours ago

for my area code, some of the sysops have left commentary on the directory page that lists the numbers. also, i used to log in to many of them.

glimshe

11 hours ago

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.

flyinghamster

8 hours ago

I'd say there were both advantages and drawbacks to the BBS scene. The biggest single advantage was that it tended to be local - of necessity, since long-distance phone calls to reach distant systems could cost a fortune, even at night rates.

There were attempts to address this. Networked forums became available, and there was PC Pursuit, an effort by Telenet to sell off-peak capacity on their X.25 network to people wanting to call faraway BBSes. A user could dial in to a local access number, then use their network to dial out to a remote system, provided their network could dial it from a nearby modem pool.

8bitsrule

10 minutes ago

This remark reminded me (when locals were king) that at one time (late 80s, early 90s?) the US Small Business Admin. created a BBS that enabled access via modem and a long-distance toll-free number on Sprint. It lasted for less than a year, but having back-and-forths getting to know people across the country was a real treat.

TheSkyHasEyes

9 hours ago

I was a 'sysop' in 1983. Had I known BBS would still be discussed today I would've snagged a video recorder and took video. It was a TRS-80 Model III with two floppies with an auto-answer 300 baud MODEM. After business hours only.

sokoloff

11 hours ago

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).

fsckboy

9 hours ago

>an early 1200 baud modem...needed a USR()

what's a USR()?

asking cuz USRobotics was a modem company

compressedgas

9 hours ago

> USR is a BASIC function to call (execute) a machine code routine

sokoloff

8 hours ago

This. I'll add the following reference in case someone is curious and wants more details:

https://www.page6.org/archive/issue_11/page_24.htm

One of the annoying things is that the most convenient way to encode a short machine code subroutine was in a BASIC string. But BASIC strings are not loaded in a predictable location in RAM, so any code intended to be encoded in a BASIC string has to be relocatable (using only relative branches/jumps). That's not an issue for a simple XMODEM checksum calculation, of course.

renewedrebecca

9 hours ago

Usr() is a way to call out to a machine (assembly) language subroutine from BASIC.

DonHopkins

5 hours ago

AppleSoft had the enigmatic and cosmopolitan "&" command!

flyinghamster

3 hours ago

Even better, there were hooks that allowed a machine-code routine triggered by & to further interpret the rest of the statement, so you could have a special-purpose "&print" statement, for instance.

mikewarot

9 hours ago

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.

mikewarot

35 minutes ago

Stories about Ward as a hacker:

Back in the days before boot ROMs were standard computer hardware, you had to use the toggle switches on the front of a computer to enter programs and data, even if you had a tape or disk drive.

Usually, this involved reading a page containing the bootstrap program, and toggling it into the computer. This process was repetitive, and error prone, because you're moving your attention back and forth, and can easily lose your place.

Ward solved this problem by recording himself reading the the boot loader to audio cassette tape. He could then hit play, and enter the data given to him by his recorded self, and focus only on the switches. ;-)

The origin of ReSource

Once upon a time, Ward had written a program, and some time later, needed to modify it, but found he had lost the source. He wrote a new program called resource, one of the first reverse assemblers.

Ward once entered a "shortest useful program" contest in the days of CP/M. Here is his entire entry, in Octal, as listed on page 6 in [1]

  j 1731751
  Author: Ward Christensen
  Length: 2 bytes
  Memory clear.
  0000 063 INX SP
  0001 307 RST 0

[1] http://vtda.org/docs/computing/AltairUserGroup/AltairUserGro...

shrubble

9 hours ago

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.

cmptrnerd6

3 hours ago

We just upgraded from Xmodem to Kermit last week in our embedded device.

shrubble

3 hours ago

Kermit is interesting also, though my understanding was that it was not quite as good as taking advantage of higher available data rates; am I wrong about that?

cmptrnerd6

2 hours ago

Entirely possible I don't understand something as I'm not sure what you mean by taking advantage of higher data rates. We're sending data over UART at the max rate that doesn't introduce too many bit errors. Mainly we needed a protocol to correct for the bit errors (by rerequesting data) and I've always used x/y/z modem for that purpose.

I picked Kermit this time because I didn't want to implement x/y/z modem again and had never used Kermit.

This [1] claims Kermit is faster in some instances depending on what features you have enabled.

[1] http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/perf.html

imdsm

9 hours ago

> 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.

relistan

11 hours ago

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.

axpvms

9 hours ago

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.

kragen

6 hours ago

It wasn't; you only had $5 and the bicycle to steal.

michaelcampbell

13 hours ago

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.

ergonaught

an hour ago

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.

joezydeco

2 hours ago

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.

LVB

11 hours ago

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.

Scramblejams

10 hours ago

(poring*)

Yep, it’s one of those names I can’t think of without seeing it emblazoned in green on a black background on my old Apple Monitor III screen.

rexreed

10 hours ago

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."

abotsis

7 hours ago

I had a meeting with him (as a customer) in probably 2007. Super unassuming and humble guy. I had no idea who he was during the meeting until after, when I saw him get in his car with an XMODEM license plate and googled him and found the connection. RIP, Ward.

NPHighview

3 hours ago

I knew him as one of the co-founders (with Randy Seuss and Ted Nelson) of Evanston's Itty Bitty Machine Company, a storefront that sold (among other things) Digital Group 8085/Z80/6502 machines. My high school friend, Alex Ellingsen, worked there (while in high school).

Recently, I've been playing with MMBasic (for E32s and RPi2040s) and a question about XMODEM and YMODEM came up on their online forum. Ward responded immediately to my inquiry, and gave me the exact information I needed.

Very nice guy.