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.
I have a physical copy of your documentary, which I finally decided to buy probably a few months after it was no longer for sale (thank you ebay). It is a memory trip for me and I learn something new every rewatch. The BBS scene in the late 80s and early to mid 90s was amazing, and is something I miss -- though I dip my toe in telnet bbs'es from time to time to reminisce.
You've done great work Jason. I was cleaning my desk last week and came across your business card, which I probably got from you at some DefCon while buying one of your excellent productions. Keep up the great work!
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
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.
Was it Telegard? WWIV was originally in Pascal but by the time I got to it, it had been rewritten in C++. Telegard was built off the Pascal version of WWIV (if I'm remembering right). There was another BBS based off WWIV in Pascal, but I don't remember the name.
I started on a Commodore 64 and C-NET BBS then was gifted a PC in late 1990 and WWIV was the closest thing with source code. We had a pretty decent modding community for both C-NET and WWIV. Good times.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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]
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.
[+] [-] textfiles|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] scionthefly|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] anonymousiam|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] xorcist|1 year ago|reply
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|1 year ago|reply
Let us stay in touch!
2:206/149 or about in my profile and you’ll find me :)
[+] [-] INTPenis|1 year ago|reply
Finding something online was a journey and it's often the journey that teaches you more than the destination.
[+] [-] squigz|1 year ago|reply
The demo scene is still alive and kicking, by the by :)
[+] [-] axpvms|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] avg_dev|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] sokoloff|1 year ago|reply
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|1 year ago|reply
what's a USR()?
asking cuz USRobotics was a modem company
[+] [-] DonHopkins|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] glimshe|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] TheSkyHasEyes|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] flyinghamster|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mikewarot|1 year ago|reply
Ward was a first principles thinker. Lately he was very active with Blinkies, helping folks learn to solder and make their own electronics.
[+] [-] mikewarot|1 year ago|reply
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]
[1] http://vtda.org/docs/computing/AltairUserGroup/AltairUserGro...[+] [-] shrubble|1 year ago|reply
Many Cisco, Adtran, Juniper etc switches and routers have it in their firmware also.
[+] [-] cmptrnerd6|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] HeyLaughingBoy|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] imdsm|1 year ago|reply
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|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Clubber|1 year ago|reply
Was it Telegard? WWIV was originally in Pascal but by the time I got to it, it had been rewritten in C++. Telegard was built off the Pascal version of WWIV (if I'm remembering right). There was another BBS based off WWIV in Pascal, but I don't remember the name.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegard
I started on a Commodore 64 and C-NET BBS then was gifted a PC in late 1990 and WWIV was the closest thing with source code. We had a pretty decent modding community for both C-NET and WWIV. Good times.
[+] [-] mianos|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pheller|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] axpvms|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] kragen|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelcampbell|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] guiambros|1 year ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] rexreed|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] abotsis|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] NPHighview|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] anonymousiam|1 year ago|reply
RIP Ward.
[+] [-] lightedman|1 year ago|reply
RIP to the man that made BBSing a bit faster for my attention-lacking self.
[+] [-] joezydeco|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] DamonHD|1 year ago|reply
https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/15/ward_christensen_obit...
[+] [-] Cerpicio|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] 8bitsrule|1 year ago|reply
[0] http://vintagecomputer.net/cisc367/byte%20nov%201978%20compu... (pp 150-157)
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/technology/randy-suess-de...
[+] [-] HeyLaughingBoy|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] LVB|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Scramblejams|1 year ago|reply
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.