IEEE Spectrum November, 2016 - 56

the Internet is a simple fact of life. We
take for granted the invisible network
that enables us to communicate, navigate,
investigate, flirt, shop, and play. Early on,
this network-of-networks connected only
select companies and university campuses.
Nowadays, it follows almost all of us into
the most intimate areas of our lives. And
yet, very few people know how the Internet
became social. ¶ Perhaps that's because
most histories of the Internet focus on
technical innovations: packet switching,
dynamic routing, addressing, and hypertext,
for example. But when anyone other
than a network engineer talks about the
Internet, he or she is rarely thinking about
such things. For most folks, the Internet is
principally a medium through which we
chat with friends, share pictures, read the
news, and do our shopping. Indeed, for those
who've been online only for the last decade
or so, the Internet is just social media's
plumbing-a vital infrastructure that we
don't think much about, except perhaps
when it breaks down. ¶ To understand how
the Internet became a medium for social
life, you have to widen your view beyond
networking technology and peer into the
makeshift laboratories of microcomputer
hobbyists of the 1970s and 1980s. That's
where many of the technical structures and
cultural practices that we now recognize
as social media were first developed by
amateurs tinkering in their free time to build
systems for computer-mediated collaboration
and communication. ¶ For years before
the Internet became accessible to the
general public, these pioneering computer
enthusiasts chatted and exchanged files with
one another using homespun "bulletin-board
systems" or BBSs, which later linked a more
diverse group of people and covered a wider
range of interests and communities. These
BBS operators blazed trails that would later
56

nov 2016

north AmericAn

SPectrUm.ieee.orG

be paved over in the construction of today's information
superhighway. So it takes some digging to reveal what
came before.
How did it all start? During the snowy winter of
1978, Ward Christensen and Randy Suess, members of the
Chicago Area Computer Hobbyist's Exchange (CACHE), began
to assemble what would become the best known of the first
small-scale BBSs. Members of CACHE were passionate about
microcomputers, at the time an arcane endeavor, and so the
club's newsletters were an invaluable source of information.
Christensen and Suess's novel idea was to put together an
online archive of club newsletters using a custom-built microcomputer and a hot new Hayes modem they had acquired.
This modem included an auto-answer feature, to which
Christensen and Suess added a custom hardware interface
between the modem and the hard-reset switch. Every time the
telephone rang, the modem would detect the incoming call
and then "cold boot" their system directly into a special host
program written in Intel 8080 assembly language. Restarting the system with every call offered a blunt but effective
means of recovering from hardware and software crashes-
a common occurrence on home-brew hardware of the time.
Once a connection was established, the host program welcomed users to the system, provided a list of articles to read,
and invited them to leave messages. Christensen and Suess
dubbed the system "Ward and Randy's Computerized Bulletin Board System," or CBBS. It was, as the name suggested,
an electronic version of the community bulletin boards that
you still see in libraries, supermarkets, cafés, and churches.
Anyone with access to a teletype or video terminal could
dial into CBBS. And after a few months, a small but lively community began to form around the system. In the hobbyist tradition of sharing information, Christensen and Suess wrote
up a report about their project titled "Hobbyist Computerized Bulletin Board," which appeared in the November 1978
issue of the influential computer magazine Byte.
The article provided details about the hardware they used
and how they organized and implemented their software. The
authors even included their phone numbers and invited readers to take CBBS for a spin. Acknowledging the experimental
nature of the system, they encouraged readers to "feel free to
hang up and try several times if you have problems." After the
issue hit newsstands, calls to their computer started pouring in.
Over the next few years, hundreds of small-scale systems
like CBBS popped up around the country. Perhaps inspired
by the Byte article, many of these new systems were organized by local computer clubs. In 1983, TAB Books, publisher
of numerous DIY electronics guides, published How to Create
Your Own Computer Bulletin Board, by Lary L. Myers. In addition to explaining the concept and motivation behind online
services, Myers's book included complete source code in the
BASIC programming language for host software. The back
of the book also listed the telephone numbers of more than
275 public bulletin-board systems in 43 U.S. states. Some
charged a nominal membership fee, while most were free to
use. The roots of social media were beginning to take hold.

Previous Pages, Welcome screens: original BBss/Jason scott

For millions of people
around the globe,

http://SPectrUm.ieee.orG

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum November, 2016