Micro Memories

摘要

In 1978, the Internet existed, but it was still largely restricted to universities and the military (and still called Arpanet.) It was only a year before that Hayes had released the first modem for PCs. While CompuServe (see the October 2003 "Micro Memories") and the Source were positioning themselves as national online services, Ward Christianson and Randy Suess of Chicago had another idea for connecting groups of users to computers: the bulletin board systems or BBS. Christianson and Suess began trying to build a personal computer version of the large mainframes that they had previously logged onto. In 1977, Christianson wrote Xmodem, the first computer program used to transfer files between computers equipped with modems. The next year, he teamed with Seuss to create the first BBS software.