Ward Christensen, a computer scientist who helped build the first online bulletin board, a forerunner of the internet messaging apps and social media services that would become a staple of modern life, died on Oct. 11 at his home in Rolling Meadows, Ill. He was 78.
His brother, Donald, said the cause was a heart attack.
In the summer of 1975, while working as an engineer at an IBM office in Chicago, Mr. Christensen joined a home computer club called the Chicago Area Computer Hobbyists’ Exchange, or CACHE. Through the club, he met a fellow hobbyist named Randy Suess. A few years later, the two began discussing how they might build a system that could send information between computers via telephone lines.
Then, on Jan. 16, 1978, a blizzard hit Chicago, covering the city in 40 inches of snow and stranding Mr. Christensen at his home in the suburbs. He phoned Mr. Suess, suggesting that they use the time to start building their messaging system. He wondered if they should get help from other club members, but Mr. Suess argued that involving more people would slow the project down.
“Forget the club. It would just be management by committee,” Mr. Suess said, as Mr. Christensen recalled their conversation to The New York Times in 2009. “It’s just me and you. I will do the hardware, and you will do the software.”
Using a spare computer, some software and a novel device called a modem, which could send and receive data across phone lines, they eventually jury-rigged a machine that allowed club members to trade information. Using their own home computers, they could remotely connect to the machine and upload messages for others to read, including meeting notices and ideas for new projects.
Mr. Christensen saw this as an electronic version of the wall-mounted bulletin boards inside grocery stores, where anyone could post paper fliers that advertised local concerts or sought babysitters. “I patterned the software after the cork-board-and-push-pins type of bulletin board,” he wrote a decade later.
When Mr. Suess suggested they call the new system “the Computer Elites’ Communication Project,” or C.E.C., Mr. Christensen demurred. In the end, they called it the Computerized Bulletin Board System, or C.B.B.S.
As the idea spread, by word of mouth and through trade magazines, computer bulletin boards emerged from hobbyist groups across the country. These makeshift systems, a means of sharing everything from short messages to video games to software code, anticipated the rise of social media apps like Reddit, TikTok, Facebook and YouTube, as well as countless internet file-sharing services.
“The idea that you can order a computer and then use it to go to places on an internet and talk to others began with these two guys,” said Jason Scott, a computer history archivist who made an online documentary about the creation of C.B.B.S. “They said, ‘Anybody can do this.’”
Ward Leon Christensen was born on Oct. 23, 1945, in West Bend, Wis., a city named for a bend in the Milwaukee River. His father, Roy, was a safety director for the West Bend Company, which made aluminum kitchen products. His mother, Florence (Hohmann) Christensen, sold World Book encyclopedias.
Though Mr. Christensen would become known among fellow hobbyists in the early 1980s for his skills as a computer programmer, he was, from an early age, someone who tinkered with hardware. As a teenager in the early 1960s, he built a computer adding machine that operated via switches and lightbulbs.
He attended the University of Wisconsin, Madison, but dropped out. He later enrolled at Milton, a small private college nearby, where he studied physics and chemistry. During his senior year, he phoned his mother to say that IBM was visiting the campus looking for new hires; she drove from their home in West Bend and bought him a new suit to wear to the interview.
In 1968, IBM offered him a job as a systems engineer in the sales office. He spent his entire career with the company, retiring in 2012.
At first, Mr. Christensen was “bitterly disappointed” that his department did not have computers, he said on an internet mailing list, adding, “So I got interested in having my own.”
Home computers began reaching the market in subsequent years, and he was among the first hobbyists to buy these machines and join clubs like CACHE, which allowed them to share tips and tricks and even to collaborate on new hardware and software.
In 1977, he developed a protocol, called XMODEM, for sending computer files across phone lines; it was later used on C.B.B.S.
When he and Mr. Suess pieced together their new messaging system in 1978, “it looked like it was put together with bailing wire and chewing gum,” Mr. Christensen recalled. Mr. Suess had soldered together hardware that would automatically load Mr. Christensen’s software onto an S-100 personal computer whenever a call came via the modem.
Mr. Christensen volunteered to run the system from his home in Dolton, Ill., just south of Chicago. But Mr. Suess said it should remain in the basement of his home in Chicago’s Wrigleyville neighborhood, so that club members in the city could tap into the machine without paying long-distance telephone charges.
The next fall, Mr. Christensen described their creation in an article he wrote for Byte, a magazine for computer hobbyists. When they retired their system less than a decade later, its phone line had received more than a half-million calls.
In addition to his brother, he is survived by his nieces, Carin and Dana Christensen, and his partner, Debra Adamson.
Despite their groundbreaking collaboration, neither Mr. Christensen nor Mr. Suess made much money from their invention or achieved much fame because of it. But Mr. Christensen took pride in what he had built. For decades, his license plate read, “XMODEM.”
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