Internet born in a Midwest blizzard
By Charles Miller February 15, 2008 San Miguel de Allende

This week marks the anniversary of an important event in the history of communications. It was three decades ago that an early version of the “internet” became available to the public for the first time.

In January of 1978, a record winter storm hit the American Midwest. The blizzard shut down Chicago and many other cities, leaving thousands of people stranded. Two of the people left homebound in the impassable conditions were Ward Christensen and Randy Suess.

Messrs. Christensen and Suess were members of CACHE, the Chicago Area Computer Hobbyists Exchange. They met at the computer club, became friends and shared ideas for how to do more with their primitive personal computers. Among the concepts they envisioned was a computerized “answering machine” to allow club members to call in using their computer and leave announcements for upcoming meetings.

Christensen had already created a file transfer protocol for sending binary computer files over dial-up POTS (Plain ol’ Telephone Service) using a modem. The idea languished because what they needed was some time to work on the project. The blizzard gave them that time.

Christensen and Suess worked on writing new software and assembling a computer they could connect to a standard phone line. After several weeks work they were ready to announce to their fellow club members that anyone could call up and connect their computer to the newly created Computer Bulletin Board System (BBS). The date was February 16, 1978.

The infant internet had already been around for a decade, but was a restricted affair. Only those big government and university computers hard-wired to the system could use it. Randy and Ward’s BBS was the first available to the general public, and the first to which a hobbyist with a home computer could connect. Callers found they could perform functions such as download software, upload data, read news, etc.

The first BBS was primitive, to say the least. Its hardware and software supported only one modem and so users had to take turns calling in. When one user hung up, the next user could call in. The use of conventional phone lines limited the connection speed severely.

In spite of these limitations, the system was seen as very useful by the users and it served to inspire the creation of others. Soon it became possible for these “boards” to have multiple phone lines, and the more popular ones soon had dozens of lines.

For a decade, computer users around the country ran up large long-distance phone bills calling BBSs in different cities.

In 1984, Tom Jennings of San Francisco created FidoNet as a means to network together BBSs so that messages could be sent between users who were not dialing up the same BBS. This gave the public its first opportunity to send email from one system to someone on a different system.

By the early nineties, many American cities had hundreds of different BBSs in operation. The heyday was short-lived because with affordable public access to the internet, and the creation of the World Wide Web in the middle nineties, BBSs rapidly declined in popularity. By the end of the decade, most BBSs had become websites accessible through the internet or had ceased to exist.

Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant, a frequent visitor to San Miguel since 1981 and now practically a full-time resident. He may be contacted at 044-415-101-8528 or email FAQ8 (at) SMAguru.com.