Ward Christensen

(person)

The inventor of XMODEM and of the BBS. Ward did physics in college and programmed mainframes for IBM.

Ward and friend Randy Suess set up their BBS on first on 1978-02-16 in Chicago. It ran on an S-100 computer with 64k RAM and two single-sided 8" 250kB diskettes.

Freeware Hall of Fame.

This article is provided by FOLDOC - Free Online Dictionary of Computing (foldoc.org)

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References in periodicals archive

Ward Christensen and Randy Suess were members of the Chicago Area Computer Hobbyists Exchange.

Chattering masses began with a bright idea in a blizzard that changed world; Social networking celebrates a landmark birthday today, as David Williamson explains

The first of the boards appeared in 1979, when a snowstorm provoked hobbyists Ward Christensen and Randy Suess to hack together something they called EBBS, the Computerized Bulletin Board System, for their Chicago-area computer users group.

The prehistory of cyberspace: how BBSes paved the way for the Web

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