Randy
Suess, a computer hobbyist who helped build the first online bulletin
board, anticipating the rise of the internet, messaging apps and social media, died ...
Randy Suess,
a computer hobbyist who helped build the first online bulletin board,
anticipating ... In late January 1978, Mr. Suess (rhymes with “loose”)
was part of an early home computer ... an idea for a new kind of
computer messaging system, but hadn't had the time to explore it. ....
2019 The New York Times Company.
Randy Suess, Computer Bulletin Board Inventor, Dies at 74
The
messaging system that he and a friend created in 1978 was a forerunner
of social media services like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.
Randy
Suess in 2004. The computer bulletin board that he and a friend created
in 1978 was a forerunner of social media services like Twitter and
Facebook.Credit...Jason Scott
Randy
Suess, a computer hobbyist who helped build the first online bulletin
board, anticipating the rise of the internet, messaging apps and social
media, died on Dec. 10 at a hospital in Chicago. He was 74.
His death was confirmed by his daughter Karrie.
In
late January 1978, Mr. Suess (rhymes with “loose”) was part of an early
home computer club called the Chicago Area Computer Hobbyists’
Exchange, or CACHE. He and another club member, an IBM engineer named
Ward Christensen, had been discussing an idea for a new kind of computer
messaging system, but hadn’t had the time to explore it. Then a
blizzard hit the Great Lakes region, covering Chicago in more than 40
inches of snow.
As the city shut down,
Mr. Christensen phoned Mr. Suess to say that they finally had enough
time to build their new system. Mr. Christensen suggested they get help
from the other members of the club, but, as he recalled in an interview,
Mr. Suess told him that would be a mistake because others would just
slow the project down.
“Forget the
club. It would just be management by committee,” Mr. Christensen
recalled Mr. Suess saying, noting that he was a self-taught computer
technician whose decisions typically came hard and fast. “It’s just me
and you. I will do the hardware, and you will do the software.”
The
idea was to build a central computer that club members could connect
to, using their own computers and telephone lines. They thought of it as
an electronic version of the cork bulletin boards on the walls of
grocery stores where anyone could post paper fliers.
Two weeks later, their system was up and running, and the club was trading messages about meetings, new ideas and new projects.
“It was a ‘meta’ system,” Mr. Christiansen said. “It was all about computers.”
At
first, Mr. Suess suggested they call it C.E.C, short for Computer
Elites’ Communication Project, but they eventually settled on
Computerized Bulletin Board System, or C.B.B.S.
In
the late 1970s and on into the ’80s, as word of their system spread
through trade magazines and word of mouth, hobbyists across the country
built their own online bulletin boards, offering everything from
real-time chat rooms to video games. These grass-roots services were the
forerunners of globe-spanning social media services like Twitter,
Facebook and YouTube.
“Everything
we do in terms of communicating with other people online can be traced
back to Randy and his bulletin board,” said Jason Scott, a computer
history archivist who made an online documentary about the creation of C.B.B.S. “The only difference is that now it is all a little slicker.”
Randy
John Suess was born on Jan. 27, 1945, in Skokie, Ill., about 15 miles
north of downtown Chicago. His father, Miland, was a police officer in
nearby Lincolnwood, and his mother, Ruth (Duppenthaler) Suess, was a
nurse.
After serving two years in the
Navy and attending the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, Mr.
Suess held a variety of technical jobs in and around the city, including
positions with IBM and Zenith. Like Mr. Christensen, he joined the new
Chicago Area Computer Hobbyists’ Exchange in the summer of 1975. It was
one of many such do-it-yourself computer clubs popping up around the
country.
Mr. Suess and Mr.
Christiansen built their electronic bulletin board using a personal
computer called the S-100. After adding a modem that could send and
receive data across a phone line, Mr. Suess soldered together some
additional hardware that could automatically restart the machine and
then load Mr. Christiansen’s software whenever someone dialed in.
“Randy
pretty much built it from scratch,” Mr. Christiansen said. “It looked
like it was put together with bailing wire and chewing gum.”
Mr.
Christiansen offered to run the system from his home in Dolton, Ill.,
south of the city. But Mr. Suess, who lived in the Wrigleyville section
of Chicago, insisted that it stay in his basement, so anyone in the city
could dial in without paying long-distance charges. By the time they
retired the system in the 1980s, its single phone line had received more
than half a million calls.
Mr. Suess
had by then built a much larger system called Chinet — short for Chicago
Network — which connected to the internet via a satellite radio. The
internet was so small that he could download the whole thing onto his
machine in a single evening. Others could then browse this global
collection of data, including a new version of C.B.B.S., through 22
phone lines plugged into a bank of modems on a wall.
Some
dialed in from as far away as Australia and Singapore. Mr. Suess’s son,
Ryan, remembered hearing the staticky whine of the modems at all hours
of the day and night. “Eventually, it just becomes white noise,” he
said.
In addition to his son and his
daughter Karrie, Mr. Suess is survived by another daughter, Christine,
and three grandchildren. His marriages to Agnes Kluck and Dawn Hendricks
ended in divorce.
Forty years after
its debut, a version of C.B.B.S. was still up and running, and anyone
could access it, even from a laptop or a smartphone. This month, the
bulletin board spread word about Mr. Suess’s death.
