What Is Computerized Bulletin Board System (CBBS)?
In the dark days of yore, when computers were the size of small rooms and had no internet connection, there was a man named Ward Christensen. He was a hobbyist who loved putting together electronics projects in his garage, and he had an idea for a way to make it easier for people like him to share information. Ward's idea was called CBBS: Computerized Bulletin Board System (CBBS). The first version of the system was just a file transfer protocol and interface for sending files and communicating over the early internet. Ward didn't do this alone—he worked with Randy Suess and other hobbyists, including the Chicago Area Computer Hobbyist Exchange (CACHE) members. As legend has it, those engineering the project launched it in January 1978 while working through a major blizzard in the Chicago area. The first version of CBBS ran on an Altair 8800 with an S-100 bus. Bulletin board systems are like the great-grandparents of the internet. They were the first online networks that allowed users to communicate with one another and exchange files, and they were text-only. It's hard to imagine now, but before YouTube and Facebook, BBS systems provided users with essential interface benefits such as online chat, message boards, and the ability to upload and download files. Before YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and an array of visual social media and messaging services, bulletin board systems accessed via relatively slow modems provided consumers with the primary means of exploring online possibilities. The 1980s was a great time for electronic bulletin board systems. The first, CBBS, was launched in 1978 by Ward Christensen and Randy Suess. After they launched their system, they were quickly followed by several other clones—and then the cloning began in earnest. With so many clones of CBBS available, there was no shortage of bulletin board communities throughout the 1980s. These bulletin board systems thrived despite low-speed modems and dial-up connections, as people found ways to connect online through these early systems.
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