The computer BBS, distant ancestor to web sites, was born this day in 1978.

In 1982 I took a job with the original Western Union, corp. – the one that used to send telegrams. They had cool tech that employees were encouraged to explore, such as a Xerox Star workstation based on the famous Sun GUI. (I wrote a short story using one of the first WYSIWYG word processors on it. I found the story the other day.)

A PC appeared at the job, one of the first in the country, with one single sided floppy drive (180,000 bytes), 48k of memory and a 300 baud modem. I bought a box of ten floppy diskettes ($30), and I patiently typed the TTY communications program into it, and I was able to connect to a BBS system in Chicago. It was Ward Christensen’s first BBS. I was hooked.

Within a year I bought my own PC and learned to program it. A career began.

The most fun I’ve ever had was cruising the BBS’s. The wonder of it all was amazing. I communicated with a small community from all around the world. The internet is billions of people, but the BBS world was numbered in the hundreds in 1982. I knew everyone and everyone knew me.

The internet is a crowded, but somehow lonely place, compared to the BBS systems of the early 1980s.

Feb. 16, 1978: Bulletin Board Goes Electronic | This Day In Tech | Wired.com.