On February 16, 1978, Ward Christensen and Randy Suess launched the first public dialup BBS, or bulletin board system, the predecessor of online discussion forums and web sites like Reddit and Digg.
An electronic bulletin board over dialup
With no public Internet to leverage, it operated over an analog phone line and a Hayes dialup modem running at 300 bits per second, connecting the outside world to an 8080-based computer Randy Suess built from spare and surplus S-100 parts running an operating system called CP/M. Only one person could use it at a time. But it contained all of the basic elements of today’s online communities.
They called the first BBS program CBBS, which stood for for Computerized Bulletin Board System. The two announced their creation to the world in the November 1978 issue of Byte magazine, where they chronicled their process of writing a prototype in MITS Basic, then coding a final version in 8080 assembly language for efficiency and reliability. They even built a level of security into the program, modifying CP/M to load CBBS instead of the command interpreter, so it wouldn’t be possible to hack your way out of the BBS and gain access to CP/M itself.
The article captured the imagination of hobbyists and before long, others began building their own bulletin boards. Suess started selling copies of CBBS to interested hobbyists for $50, and by the end of 1981 there were a total of 15 bulletin boards running on CBBS in the United States.
Inspiration for the first BBS
Reportedly Christensen got the idea when he was trapped in his Chicago home during the Great Blizzard of 1978. He took inspiration from the community bulletin boards that once adorned the entrance of public places like libraries, schools and supermarkets. Working with Suess, Christensen set out to create the software and carried it out in perhaps as little as two weeks. Christensen and Suess reported it took a month, to make their story more believable.
Christensen ran a CBBS-based board into the early 1990s.
The golden age of BBSing ended when the Internet became readily available. Even before that, CBBS declined sharply in popularity as the platform it ran on, CP/M, went by the wayside in favor of newer systems like MS-DOS. But one of Christensen’s inventions, the file transfer protocol Xmodem, outlived CBBS and saw use on countless other bulletin board systems well into the 1990s. Hobbyists still run retro-style bulletin boards today, usually by connecting them to a dummy modem that speaks Telnet over TCP/IP, since analog phone lines are increasingly scarce. Even though the Internet initially displaced BBSs, today it gives them new life.
Ward Christensen died October 11, 2024 in suburban Chicago. He was 78. Christensen worked for IBM from 1968 until his retirement in 2012. His collaborator, Randy Suess, died a few years earlier in Chicago, on December 10, 2019, aged 74.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.