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1978–early 1990sshut down in the 1990s

CBBS

The first mass-market computer bulletin board you reached by dialing in on a modem: two friends from a computer club put the software and the homemade hardware together in Chicago in January and February 1978, so they would not have to phone each other one by one before meetings. An article about the project in Byte magazine spread through the hobbyist community and launched the BBS culture that ran for the next two decades, up to the mass-market internet.

Founders Ward Christensen · Randy Suess
Domains chinet.com
pre-internetbbshobbyist-clubscratch-your-own-itchduo-founders

In brief

CBBS was the first mass-market computer bulletin board you reached by dialing in on a modem: Ward Christensen and Randy Suess, two members of the same computer club, built the software and the homemade hardware between them in Chicago in January and February 1978, so they would not have to phone each other one by one before meetings. An article about the project in Byte magazine spread through the whole hobbyist community and launched the culture of electronic bulletin boards, which lasted almost two decades, up to the mass-market internet. Both founders are dead now, Suess in 2019 and Christensen in 2024, but their invention, and separately the XMODEM protocol, outlived them by decades.

How it started (the founders)

Christensen and Suess met around 1975 at the CACHE club (Chicago Area Computer Hobbyists' Exchange), which Bob Schwartz had founded at Northwestern University on the rising wave of interest in microcomputers. Both were ordinary engineers rather than entrepreneurs: Christensen programmed at IBM from 1968 until he retired in 2012, and Suess worked at IBM and Zenith after serving in the Navy. Before the bulletin board they were already trading files with each other on cassettes over a 300-baud acoustic modem; in January 1977 Christensen bought a CP/M license, and that summer he wrote MODEM.ASM, a file transfer protocol that soon turned into XMODEM in the hands of another hobbyist, Keith Petersen.

On January 16, 1978 the snow in Chicago was heavy enough that Christensen could not get out of his house, and the date is confirmed not only by the 1989 memoir but by the Byte article itself, written while it was all still fresh in 1978; this is not the historic "Great Blizzard of 1978," which would reach the Midwest only a week and a half later (see Legend vs. the record). Christensen called Suess with the idea of hanging a spare S-100 machine on the line of the club's answering machine, so that CACHE members could dictate news for the mailing list. Suess took the idea over and turned it around: "...forget the club, a committee project will never be done — just the two of us — you do the software, I'll do the hardware." So the thing was conceived for the club but was built pointedly around the club's own process. They worked evenings for about two weeks; testing began in early February, but publicly they announced a span of one month so the project would not look too hasty, and since then the birthday of CBBS has been taken as February 16, 1978; the same date is given by the 1978 article itself and by the BBS historian Jason Scott in 2024.

Year-by-year timeline

Lesser-known but significant facts

  1. At first the software was called "CE.C," not CBBS. Suess jokingly christened it "Computer Elite's project C — Communications"; the name CBBS took hold only with the article in Byte.
  2. Christensen and Suess sold copies of the program for money rather than giving them away. After the haggling ($25 → $50), about 200 copies went out; all the money went to Suess, who had put it into the hardware. What was free was the documentation in Byte, not the code itself.
  3. To protect the disk drive motors, Suess built a circuit around 555 timers that switched the system on at the signal of an incoming call and switched it off 10 seconds after the caller hung up, because otherwise the 117 V motors wore out quickly from running nonstop.
  4. Suess analyzed calls to the board on an offline "dashboard," an old Heath chart recorder wired to the drive motor, with a sheet that lasted two days, and they worked out calling patterns from the graph.
  5. Christensen and Suess sometimes sat "on duty" online themselves and traded messages with callers, and some of the users doubted that "Ward & Randy" existed as real people at all rather than as automation.
  6. At a CACHE club meeting they expected 5 to 10 people who would want to call in, and 25 hands went up. A precise early demand signal from inside the club, the one they had formally routed around while building the thing.

Legend vs. the record

The first growth lever

The lever was not the board itself but the article about it. In November 1978, nine months after launch, Christensen and Suess described the project (the hardware, the software, the approach) in Byte, the most influential hobbyist publication of the microcomputer era. Byte circulated across North America and was read by exactly the audience that could rebuild the system at home: other members of clubs like CACHE. This was not an advertising gesture: the article laid out the technical implementation in detail, down to the BIOS level, and in the section "Accessing the System" it openly invited readers to call the system, with the board's own number printed in the text; the welcome screen separately showed Christensen's and Suess's personal numbers for reports of technical trouble. What was open was not the code, since Suess sold a copy of the program for $50, but the chance to see how the thing worked and rebuild it from scratch. That is what started the wave: independent hobbyists around the country began putting together their own boards on the CBBS model, and by the middle of the 1980s there were already thousands of such systems, out of which a network layer like FidoNet grew a few years later and tied the independent boards to each other. The second and less visible lever was the XMODEM protocol itself: Christensen did not defend it and did not try to monetize it, so it spread far wider and faster than the board did and became the de facto standard for exchanging files over a modem for decades to come.

Parallels today (projects from the catalog)

What a builder can take from this in 2026

  1. Build for your own pain, in a way that goes around the committee that only discusses that pain. The idea of dial-in access for CACHE had been floating around the club before; things moved only when Suess pointedly cut the club itself out of the process.
  2. Give away knowledge of how the product works more readily than the product. CBBS was sold for money, and what was free was the article with the full technical breakdown; in the end what spread was not a copy of the program but the idea, rebuilt by thousands of hobbyists on their own.
  3. An infrastructure byproduct can outlive the main thing. XMODEM, written simply to exchange files with Suess, spread wider and lasted longer than the bulletin board did, because it solved a small but universal problem with no strings attached.
  4. A good story is almost always a little more precise than the legend about it. The line that it was built in a single snowy night sells better than two weeks of evenings after one snowy day, which is why the authors themselves rounded two weeks up to a month, and that went around as fact.
  5. A willingness to answer your first users in person is part of the product, not a cost. Christensen and Suess sat on the line themselves and traded messages with callers, to the point that some of the users doubted they were real.

Discrepancies and what we could not verify

Sources (primary first)

Secondary (context, cross-check):

The same thing, about today

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