Telecommunications pioneer Ward Christensen was born October 23, 1945 in West Bend, Wis. He died aged 78 October 11, 2024 in Rolling Meadows, Ill., a suburb of Chicago. Christensen invented the Xmodem file transfer protocol and co-invented the bulletin board system, two innovations that greatly increased the utility of modems when used with small computers.
Ward Christensen’s professional career
In 1968, Christensen graduated from Milton College with a Bachelor of Arts in physics and chemistry. Later that same year, IBM hired Christensen as a systems engineer.
He worked for IBM for 44 years, until he retired in 2012. His last job title at IBM was field technical sales specialist. In a 1993 interview, he said he was disappointed to start at IBM and find they didn’t have computers in their sales offices. He said in the same interview he lobbied IBM and other companies to release a small computer in the 1970s, but they didn’t see the market.
IBM did eventually see the market for it and released a small computer in 1981.
For about half of Christensen’s tenure at IBM, it had a policy of full employment. If you did your job and met expectations, you had a job for as long as you wanted it. IBM’s financial troubles in the early 1990s brought an end to that, but Christensen was able to navigate the workforce reductions–IBM didn’t call them that, and they definitely didn’t call them layoffs–and spend his entire career with one company.
Writing in his July 1983 Byte magazine column, Jerry Pournelle called Ward Christensen “a public benefactor.” His job security at IBM allowed him to be one.
Telecommunications
Christensen didn’t wait for IBM to get involved with small computers. In 1975, he purchased an Altair computer and joined the Chicago Area Computer Hobbyists’ Exchange. He recounted that the club had a cork bulletin board at meetings that club members used to post notes to one another.
After Hayes released its first modems, Christensen started thinking about the idea of a bulletin board system to facilitate transferring files and messages among club members, an electronic equivalent to the corkboard. In January 1978, during a snowstorm, he worked on the idea with his friend Randy Suess. Christensen wrote the software, while Seuss put together a computer to run it on. Both Suess and Christensen donated parts to the effort. Suess found some surplus parts at a computer store to complete the machine. The board, CBBS, went online in February 1978.
They published an article about it in the November 1978 issue of Byte magazine.
The software to access it already existed. In August 1977, Christensen had released a simple telecommunications program for CP/M called modem.asm that allowed a comptuer and modem to emulate a terminal, and included a file transfer protocol called Xmodem.
Christensen was a prolific developer. In 1983, Jerry Pournelle wrote of a collection of CP/M public domain software that “probably 50 percent of the really good programs were written by Ward Christensen.”
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.