BBS Twenty-Five Ye@R$ Old.

Ward Christensen, mainframe programmer and home computer hobbyist, was stuck at home behind drifts too thick to dig. He'd been in the habit of swapping progams with Randy Suess, a fellow hacker -- in the old sense of someone who did smart things with dumb electronics -- by recording them onto cassettes and posting them. They'd invented the hardware and software to do that, but in that same chilly month of 1978 someone called Bill Hayes came up with a neat circuit called the Hayes MicroModem 100. Ward called Randy, complained about the weather, and said wouldn't it be a smart idea to have a computer on the phone line where people could leave messages. "I'll do the hardware. When will the software be ready?" said Randy.

The answer was two weeks later, when the Computerised Bulletin Board System first spun its disk, picked up the line and took a message. February 16th, 1978 was the official birthday: another two weeks after it really came to life, says Christensen, because nobody would believe they did it in a fortnight.

For the first time, people could converse with others independently of social, temporal or spatial connections. People made the comparison at the time with the great epistolatory conversations of the Victorians, where men and women of letters sent long hand-written notes to each other two or three times a day, but BBS life was much more anarchic than that. You didn't know with whom you were swapping messages, but you could quickly find out if they were worth it. At first envisioned as local meeting places where people who knew each other in real life could get together from home, BBSs rapidly became entrepots for complete strangers -- the virtual community had arrived, with its joys, flamewars and intense emotions.

Ten years later, bulletin boards had evolved into a cooperative mesh of considerable complexity, A system called Fidonet linked them together, so mail from one could be forwarded to another anywhere in the world via a tortuous skein of late night automated phone calls. File-transfer protocols, graphics, interactive games and far too much politics had all transformed that first box of bits and chips beyond recognition.

Then came that world's own extinction-level event, as the asteroid of the Internet came smashing through the stratosphere and changed the ecosystem for good. That we were ready for the Net, and that every country had its own set of local experts who'd been there, done that and knew what to do next, is in large part due to the great Chicago snowstorm of 1978 and two people who rolled up their sleeves to make a good idea happen.
ZDNet UK