6 ms·

Randy Suess, computer bulletin board inventor, has died

122 points by pgrote 7y ago

kbr2000 7y ago
Well, thank you a lot Randy! Great idea, good times... In case this interests someone, I recommend you to check out Jason Scott's BBS Documentary [http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/ http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/], and while the DVDs sold out, it seems to be available on his youtube channel [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dddbe9OuJLU&list=PL7nj3G6Jpv2G6Gp6NvN1kUtQuW8QshBWE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dddbe9OuJLU&list=PL7nj3G6Jpv...]. PS. adding a trailing dot after .com in the article URL saves you some trouble :)
- kderbyma 7y ago
  I was going to recommend the same thing - great documentary. One of the places I learned about BBS's because I missed out (born too late). Also...I would recommend [https://www.textfiles.com/ https://www.textfiles.com/] to see some content from some bulletin boards
  - mgrennan 7y ago
    Jason Scott uploaded all the video he took trailing to places making the BBS Documentary to the Internet archive. There is more there.
- th0ma5 7y ago
  TIL http://www.dns-sd.org/trailingdotsindomainnames.html http://www.dns-sd.org/trailingdotsindomainnames.html I imagine that upsets cookies and scripts and such, but I wonder how long until they "fix" that?
influx 7y ago
I wouldn't be in this industry without stumbling into the BBS subculture. Thanks for everything!
mrandish 7y ago
Wow, I didn't get online until a got a 300 baud modem around 1981 but I remember dialing into CBBS once. I remember because I was on the west coast and it was in Chicago so I just dialed in to say I'd connected. To minimize the cost I got my dad's stopwatch out to ensure I hung up at 59 seconds exactly. What I find fascinating now is that I was able to connect, read the greeting, look through the main menu and leave a note in whatever counted as the 'guest book' - all in 59 seconds at a connection speed a decent typist could beat. Yesterday, I turned on my XBox One for the first time in several months so a visiting pre-teen could entertain themselves while his parents chatted. It took more than 20 minutes to atone for the crime of not turning it on for a while. First, it demanded a 'mandatory OS upgrade' followed by a reboot, then that I re-login and verify an MSFT account I never use (despite only wanting to run one game from a DVD-ROM already in the drive). Then the game itself wouldn't run until we completed a mandatory update download even though it worked fine last time it ran and we didn't try to do anything online. BTW, not just bagging on XB. My PS4 pulls the same shit. If one of the next gen consoles coming soon advertised a "Just fucking load this media and work" mode, I'd choose it solely for that reason.
- madrox 7y ago
  What I read out of this is that times were better when there were fewer bad actors. Every UX pain you mention is somewhat a fight against piracy and hacking.
  - mrandish 7y ago
    > times were better when there were fewer bad actors. At the meta-level, I don't think there are, per capita, more 'bad actors' in any broad consumer population today than there were 30 years ago. Most people are generally about the same morally and ethically in their day-to-day lives as we were back then. I think mass media and social media are incentivized to make things look worse today but the data doesn't support that view. Media and software piracy are good examples. It's no harder today to pirate most music, movies or games than it was 20 years ago. Comparing the free Napster-to-Torrent options vs the paid-Spotify, Netflix, and Xbox/PS4 subscription services show consumers will pay a reasonable price for convenience. I would argue that anti-piracy efforts that make the user experience worse are shortsighted optimizations that are long-term foolish. In 2019 the recording industry set a new total revenue record thanks to the subscription model, finally surpassing the peak of the physical media era.
a-dub 7y ago
ATH0 NO CARRIER
- buck4roo 7y ago
  +++ Wait 1 second ATH
teddyh 7y ago
I thought that Lee Felsenstein and the Community Memory project would count as the first?
jejones3141 7y ago
RIP Mr. Suess, and I hope you're not cringing too much at "Mr. Suess and Mr. Christiansen built their electronic bulletin board using a personal computer called the S-100."
- flomo 7y ago
  That sentence conveyed an important fact, but is missing a word or two for technical accuracy. Hopefully, after a long full life, he had much more important things to cringe about! Glad the Times published his obit even with this bit.
  - 8bitsrule 7y ago
    Here's a PDF of the 1978 Byte with all the details. http://vintagecomputer.net/cisc367/byte%20nov%201978%20computerized%20BBS%20-%20ward%20christensen.pdf http://vintagecomputer.net/cisc367/byte%20nov%201978%20compu...
    - flomo 7y ago
      Super interesting primary source with the technical details and a bit about how they built the community. Thanks and merry christmas!
empressplay 7y ago
ICYMI: https://paleotronic.com/2019/09/04/bbses-partying-online-like-its-1989/ https://paleotronic.com/2019/09/04/bbses-partying-online-lik...
michaelcampbell 7y ago
So sad to hear, as one who grew up with tech like this. I actually had a short online chat with Ward Christiansen on CompuServe in.... 1985 to 1987ish time frame. He said he was surprised many people even remembered XMODEM.
- myself248 7y ago
  Hah! XMODEM still shows up in a surprising number of places. Bootloaders and stuff use it for firmware recovery, although I think we're past the era where Cisco routers used it for OS upgrades.
koz1000 7y ago
I was a Chinet subscriber in the 90s and early 2000s. For many years after I left UIUC it was one of the few places you could get a Usenet feed without belonging to a university or a company like AT&T. I met Randy at a number of parties and CBBS reunions. He was a unique cat, and this NYTimes writeup was very nicely done. Thank you, Randy. We'll miss you.
raintrees 7y ago
Thanks, Mr. Suess, for my introduction to online conversations and a profitable business model for a while. My first introduction was to a BBS that was localized around Santa Cruz, CA - We even met up once in real life at the Scotts Valley Roller Rink. I think it was called Internet Cafe, although in retrospect that seems very vague as a name... My ISP shortly thereafter was Mtnweb... Which got bought by Got.Net, which is still in operation! Then later I made decent revenue selling BBS systems based on WorldGroup to Builders Exchanges in the Bay Area. My wife and I would hand make the sign-up kits for contractors, complete with 3 1/2" discs and installation/connection instructions, sent in a nice little manila envelope. I still have a few of the WorldGroup software box packages in my library... My how times have changed. That was back in the period where I was lucky if a vendor had a 1200 BAUD modem (or faster - Maybe even 9600!) hooked up to download drivers from - Assuming I could get through with no busy signal. Otherwise I had to wait 3-5 days for a drivers disk to arrive via postal mail. Memories...
- raintrees 7y ago
  Hah! My wife just found a donations envelope that never got sent in addressed to Electric Cafe - THAT was the name of my first BBS... Internet Cafe did seem close but too generic.
lightedman 7y ago
Mega RIP to the man responsible for a huge chunk of my childhood. I used to run Nucleus in Texas and Tennessee when I lived in those states. Was how I met my first friend in TN, when he logged into my then-blazing 9600 baud capable BBS, with LoRD and Sinbaud and The Pit and Baron Realms elite and Tradewars door games.
martin1b 7y ago
AT OK ATDT *70, 7778889999 Love those days. You always felt like you were in a secret society. You couldn't talk to anyone else about what you were up to because they wouldn't understand it. Thanks Randy and Ward for a great gift. BBSs are what sparked my interest in computers in the first place. Thanks Jason Scott for the great documentary. Watched it several months ago and it brought me back. Wow those were good times.
GoofballJones 7y ago
I lived in Chicago and would log into CBBS, Ward and Randy's and The Ward Board all the time. Thank you, Randy, for all the good times I had on those boards and the joy and excitement of discovering new things, even if was just to say hi to strangers with a similar interest.

122 points by pgrote 7y ago

kbr2000 7y ago

Well, thank you a lot Randy! Great idea, good times... In case this interests someone, I recommend you to check out Jason Scott's BBS Documentary [http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/ http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/], and while the DVDs sold out, it seems to be available on his youtube channel [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dddbe9OuJLU&list=PL7nj3G6Jpv2G6Gp6NvN1kUtQuW8QshBWE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dddbe9OuJLU&list=PL7nj3G6Jpv...]. PS. adding a trailing dot after .com in the article URL saves you some trouble :)

kderbyma 7y ago
I was going to recommend the same thing - great documentary. One of the places I learned about BBS's because I missed out (born too late). Also...I would recommend [https://www.textfiles.com/ https://www.textfiles.com/] to see some content from some bulletin boards
- mgrennan 7y ago
  Jason Scott uploaded all the video he took trailing to places making the BBS Documentary to the Internet archive. There is more there.
th0ma5 7y ago
TIL http://www.dns-sd.org/trailingdotsindomainnames.html http://www.dns-sd.org/trailingdotsindomainnames.html I imagine that upsets cookies and scripts and such, but I wonder how long until they "fix" that?

influx 7y ago

I wouldn't be in this industry without stumbling into the BBS subculture. Thanks for everything!

mrandish 7y ago

Wow, I didn't get online until a got a 300 baud modem around 1981 but I remember dialing into CBBS once. I remember because I was on the west coast and it was in Chicago so I just dialed in to say I'd connected. To minimize the cost I got my dad's stopwatch out to ensure I hung up at 59 seconds exactly. What I find fascinating now is that I was able to connect, read the greeting, look through the main menu and leave a note in whatever counted as the 'guest book' - all in 59 seconds at a connection speed a decent typist could beat. Yesterday, I turned on my XBox One for the first time in several months so a visiting pre-teen could entertain themselves while his parents chatted. It took more than 20 minutes to atone for the crime of not turning it on for a while. First, it demanded a 'mandatory OS upgrade' followed by a reboot, then that I re-login and verify an MSFT account I never use (despite only wanting to run one game from a DVD-ROM already in the drive). Then the game itself wouldn't run until we completed a mandatory update download even though it worked fine last time it ran and we didn't try to do anything online. BTW, not just bagging on XB. My PS4 pulls the same shit. If one of the next gen consoles coming soon advertised a "Just fucking load this media and work" mode, I'd choose it solely for that reason.

madrox 7y ago
What I read out of this is that times were better when there were fewer bad actors. Every UX pain you mention is somewhat a fight against piracy and hacking.
- mrandish 7y ago
  > times were better when there were fewer bad actors. At the meta-level, I don't think there are, per capita, more 'bad actors' in any broad consumer population today than there were 30 years ago. Most people are generally about the same morally and ethically in their day-to-day lives as we were back then. I think mass media and social media are incentivized to make things look worse today but the data doesn't support that view. Media and software piracy are good examples. It's no harder today to pirate most music, movies or games than it was 20 years ago. Comparing the free Napster-to-Torrent options vs the paid-Spotify, Netflix, and Xbox/PS4 subscription services show consumers will pay a reasonable price for convenience. I would argue that anti-piracy efforts that make the user experience worse are shortsighted optimizations that are long-term foolish. In 2019 the recording industry set a new total revenue record thanks to the subscription model, finally surpassing the peak of the physical media era.

a-dub 7y ago

ATH0 NO CARRIER

buck4roo 7y ago
+++ Wait 1 second ATH

teddyh 7y ago

I thought that Lee Felsenstein and the Community Memory project would count as the first?

jejones3141 7y ago

RIP Mr. Suess, and I hope you're not cringing too much at "Mr. Suess and Mr. Christiansen built their electronic bulletin board using a personal computer called the S-100."

flomo 7y ago
That sentence conveyed an important fact, but is missing a word or two for technical accuracy. Hopefully, after a long full life, he had much more important things to cringe about! Glad the Times published his obit even with this bit.
- 8bitsrule 7y ago
  Here's a PDF of the 1978 Byte with all the details. http://vintagecomputer.net/cisc367/byte%20nov%201978%20computerized%20BBS%20-%20ward%20christensen.pdf http://vintagecomputer.net/cisc367/byte%20nov%201978%20compu...
  - flomo 7y ago
    Super interesting primary source with the technical details and a bit about how they built the community. Thanks and merry christmas!

empressplay 7y ago

ICYMI: https://paleotronic.com/2019/09/04/bbses-partying-online-like-its-1989/ https://paleotronic.com/2019/09/04/bbses-partying-online-lik...

michaelcampbell 7y ago

So sad to hear, as one who grew up with tech like this. I actually had a short online chat with Ward Christiansen on CompuServe in.... 1985 to 1987ish time frame. He said he was surprised many people even remembered XMODEM.

myself248 7y ago
Hah! XMODEM still shows up in a surprising number of places. Bootloaders and stuff use it for firmware recovery, although I think we're past the era where Cisco routers used it for OS upgrades.

koz1000 7y ago

I was a Chinet subscriber in the 90s and early 2000s. For many years after I left UIUC it was one of the few places you could get a Usenet feed without belonging to a university or a company like AT&T. I met Randy at a number of parties and CBBS reunions. He was a unique cat, and this NYTimes writeup was very nicely done. Thank you, Randy. We'll miss you.

raintrees 7y ago

Thanks, Mr. Suess, for my introduction to online conversations and a profitable business model for a while. My first introduction was to a BBS that was localized around Santa Cruz, CA - We even met up once in real life at the Scotts Valley Roller Rink. I think it was called Internet Cafe, although in retrospect that seems very vague as a name... My ISP shortly thereafter was Mtnweb... Which got bought by Got.Net, which is still in operation! Then later I made decent revenue selling BBS systems based on WorldGroup to Builders Exchanges in the Bay Area. My wife and I would hand make the sign-up kits for contractors, complete with 3 1/2" discs and installation/connection instructions, sent in a nice little manila envelope. I still have a few of the WorldGroup software box packages in my library... My how times have changed. That was back in the period where I was lucky if a vendor had a 1200 BAUD modem (or faster - Maybe even 9600!) hooked up to download drivers from - Assuming I could get through with no busy signal. Otherwise I had to wait 3-5 days for a drivers disk to arrive via postal mail. Memories...

raintrees 7y ago
Hah! My wife just found a donations envelope that never got sent in addressed to Electric Cafe - THAT was the name of my first BBS... Internet Cafe did seem close but too generic.

lightedman 7y ago

Mega RIP to the man responsible for a huge chunk of my childhood. I used to run Nucleus in Texas and Tennessee when I lived in those states. Was how I met my first friend in TN, when he logged into my then-blazing 9600 baud capable BBS, with LoRD and Sinbaud and The Pit and Baron Realms elite and Tradewars door games.

martin1b 7y ago

AT OK ATDT *70, 7778889999 Love those days. You always felt like you were in a secret society. You couldn't talk to anyone else about what you were up to because they wouldn't understand it. Thanks Randy and Ward for a great gift. BBSs are what sparked my interest in computers in the first place. Thanks Jason Scott for the great documentary. Watched it several months ago and it brought me back. Wow those were good times.

GoofballJones 7y ago

I lived in Chicago and would log into CBBS, Ward and Randy's and The Ward Board all the time. Thank you, Randy, for all the good times I had on those boards and the joy and excitement of discovering new things, even if was just to say hi to strangers with a similar interest.