[HN Gopher] Ward Christensen (of BBS and XMODEM fame) has died
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Ward Christensen (of BBS and XMODEM fame) has died
Author : DamonHD
Score : 161 points
Date : 2024-10-13 15:39 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| Oh, darn.
|
| 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.
| DamonHD wrote:
| Also see:
| https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren/113300835222615...
| INTPenis wrote:
| There is NSFW content in the middle of that thread. Took me by
| surprise.
| renewedrebecca wrote:
| Mastodon.social gets regularly hit with waves of spam.
| andrewf wrote:
| I Perceive NSFW content in the middle of _this_ thread :P
| sokoloff wrote:
| RIP.
|
| 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 wrote:
| > _an early 1200 baud modem...needed a USR()_
|
| what's a USR()?
|
| asking cuz USRobotics was a modem company
| compressedgas wrote:
| > USR is a BASIC function to call (execute) a machine code
| routine
| sokoloff wrote:
| This. I'll add the following reference in case someone is
| curious and wants more details:
|
| https://www.page6.org/archive/issue_11/page_24.htm
|
| One of the annoying things is that the most convenient way
| to encode a short machine code subroutine was in a BASIC
| string. But BASIC strings are not loaded in a predictable
| location in RAM, so any code intended to be encoded in a
| BASIC string has to be relocatable (using only relative
| branches/jumps). That's not an issue for a simple XMODEM
| checksum calculation, of course.
| renewedrebecca wrote:
| Usr() is a way to call out to a machine (assembly) language
| subroutine from BASIC.
| glimshe wrote:
| 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.
| TheSkyHasEyes wrote:
| 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.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| 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.
| wnoise wrote:
| Dying of BBS and XMODEM fame sounds painful.
|
| Can dang or another mod move the parenthetical modifier?
| DamonHD wrote:
| Fixed, thanks.
|
| That was my third attempt at being concise and informative...
| relistan wrote:
| 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.
| LVB wrote:
| 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.
| Scramblejams wrote:
| (poring*)
|
| 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.
| xorcist wrote:
| 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.
| jlundberg wrote:
| 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 :)
| axpvms wrote:
| I found myself reading through textfiles.com just recently,a
| really good archive of BBS-era text files.
| INTPenis wrote:
| It's the standard antithesis of instant gratification culture.
| We had to actually wait for things to happen, to download, to
| render, to dial.
|
| Finding something online was a journey and it's often the
| journey that teaches you more than the destination.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| Even when you had a networked forum like FidoNet's Echomail
| (or Usenet, for that matter), it would take time for messages
| to propagate through the network - and they could sometimes
| fail to be delivered.
| avg_dev wrote:
| here is one nice site http://bbslist.textfiles.com/
| rexreed wrote:
| 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."
| abotsis wrote:
| 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.
| greenthrow wrote:
| BBSes were a big part of my pre-teen years, before dial up
| internet access became available in my area. Really difficult to
| explain to younger folks what it was like. XMODEM was _the_ file
| transfer protocol for more than a decade, as I recall.
| bane wrote:
| @dang this would seem to be worthy of a black banner day?
| shrubble wrote:
| 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.
| axpvms wrote:
| 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.
| imdsm wrote:
| > 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.
| mikewarot wrote:
| 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.
| anonymousiam wrote:
| It was always Ward Christensen protocol before people began
| calling it Xmodem protocol. That is why everybody knew his name.
|
| RIP Ward.
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(page generated 2024-10-13 22:00 UTC)