Post No Bills! |

Memories.

I remember having a PDP-8 in my lab/office. Complete with a paper tape feeder. Back when I was in grad school.

A few years later, we used TRS-80’s (affectionately called Trash80’s) to run a variety of lab functions.

It was using this device (and later one of our Osborne-1 portable [as in Singer Sewing machine clone] computers] that I began visiting CBBS. (The Computerized Bulletin Board System.)

Decades before Craigslist, the CBBS system (nee 16 February 1978 during the Chicago Great Blizzard, and then served only the Chicago community- it wasn’t until they announced it was available in the November 1978 edition of Byte [a defunct monthly magazine about all things computer]) let a bunch of us computer nerds communicate on a national level. The CBBS itself was a modified Z80 (8080 cpu) motherboard, a modem [300 baud- about 10 million times slower than today’s internet connections], and 8K (that’s thousand- not megs, not gigs) of memory. In Suess’ basement. Oh, yeah, with floppy drives that could hold all of 173K of data. (I remember when a 350K floppy was THE great improvement. My current hard drive would hold 3 million of those!)

This CBBS was the brain child of Ward Christenson (an IBM engineer) and Randy Suess (a computer hobbyist, no relation to Dr…). And, as opposed to what y’all are used to seeing and doing on Facebook, Twitter, and the like, we sometimes waited a fortnight- or longer- to get replies to our technical queries.

And, the odds were our phone bill was astronomical (since long distance was priced separately from phone access- and few, if any, BBS lines were local). Especially because I was living in Charlottesville at the time- where the phone company was the Charlottesville Telephone Company (soon to be Centel- and then Sprint)- and when you dialed a 1 (to access long distance lines) after 11PM [when the rates were lowest], the odds are you got a busy signal before typing in the area code.

But, the system worked- and we relied on it. We learned their special binary protocol (of course called Modem [later upgraded to XModem!]. Believe it or not, this system still survives, but it’s now called Chinet.com (Suess’ version, short for Chicago network), Ward’s Board (his version of the CBBS) died about 3 decades ago.

If you watched the AMC program “Halt and Catch Fire” (I miss that great series), you have an idea of what this entailed.

So, why the history lesson?

Because Randy Suess died (at the age of 74) earlier this month. Aptly the news of his death was posted on the bulletin board. (Ward is happily ensconced in Wisconsin.)

Another pioneer- long before the Internet as we know it took hold- has passed on.