Let it snow
It’s snowing in Tivoli right now which makes me think about a great DVD I just got.
It’s called BBS: The Documentary and I highly recommend it.
It chronicles the wild and wooly age of computer bulletin boards (BBS), the "online world" that existed before the Internet. I found the film absolutely fascinating…
One of the things that jumped out at me was the story behind how the first BBS came to be.
What’s a BBS? It’s a long story if you don’t already knowit, but to cut to the chase, before the web, there used to be over one hundred thousand of them. (AOL started out as a little BBS.)
Ward Christensen wrote the software and Randy Suess put together the hardware for the very first one.
What inspired their world-changing idea?
Snow.
On the evening of January 15, a storm dumped a ton of snow on Chicago and neither Ward nor Randy could
get to work. To keep themselves from going stir crazy, they decided to start work on a project they’d been talking about for a while: making
it possible for members of their computer club to ‘upload’ content
directly to the club’s computer.
A month later, on February 16, 1978, the first computer bulletin board was launched.
Let it snow!
The web site for BBS: The Documentary is here: http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/