Ward Christensen, Early Visionary of Social Media, Dies at 78 – The New York Times (nytimes.com)
RIP Ward Christensen – Creator of the BBS and Online Communities (youtube.com)
VCF MW (Midwest) 2023 — voidstar
Oct. 11, 2024
I was taking images of the “fake” computers on the right, but later realized Ward was passing by at the moment (his VCF nametag was signed as “xmodem”).
My daughter had prepared 80 copies of our “domesticating the computer” poster (discussed here). We were flying, so that’s how many we could carry, and also what we budgeted to have printed.
As we planned, we had given away almost all of them at VCF – then I overheard someone say that Ward Christensen was in the area. While he’s not a “household name” to most, I did recognize the name. I had watched the then-recent BBS Documentaries, as I was a “retired SysOp” myself (one of my own main starts in computing was a custom BBS, derived from the Forum BBS source in Turbo Pascal).
I grabbed one of the copies of our poster and my ComputerLib book, and I looked around for Ward – he was helping folks learn about soldering at one of the table setups at the event. As he got a free moment, I asked if I could talk with him for about 10 minutes – and he did! I was a bit “star struck” and didn’t feel right to ask if we could record the conversation. But I did get the nerve to ask him to sign both the poster (which officially belongs to my daughter) and my ComputerLib book (which is a late 1987 revised edition).
On the back of the poster, my daughter signed on the left (since we were giving the posters out), I signed on the right, and Ward is there signed on the bottom right. And just by pure coincidence, this was poster #78 (Ward’s famous work on CBBS was in that winter going into 1978).
