Profile · West Bend, Wisconsin
Ward Leon Christensen
Computer pioneer who co-created the first dial-up bulletin board system (CBBS) and wrote XMODEM; born in West Bend
$1.5 million+
Ward Leon Christensen was the West Bend–born IBM engineer who, snowed in one Chicago winter, wrote the software that let hobbyists leave messages without driving across town. The computerized bulletin board and the XMODEM file-transfer protocol became foundations of the online age, and he gave the code away. He was born in West Bend on October 23, 1945, to Roy Christensen, safety director at the West Bend Company, and Florence Hohmann Christensen, who sold World Book encyclopedias. At West Bend High he built a computer that took first at the 1963 science fair. He drifted through Madison, finished physics and chemistry at Milton College, and joined IBM in 1968. He stayed until 2012; the last title was field technical sales specialist. Snowed in with Randy Suess in January 1978, he wrote the software for CBBS so the Chicago Area Computer Hobbyists’ Exchange could post messages. They went live February 16 and later pretended the build had taken four weeks so nobody would think it was rushed. A year earlier he had written MODEM, later XMODEM: break a file into packets, check each one, retry the noise. Jerry Pournelle wrote in 1983 that maybe half the really good CP/M public-domain programs were Christensen’s. He received Dvorak Awards in 1992 and an Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award in 1993. He died in Rolling Meadows, Illinois, on October 11, 2024. The internet is downstream of a West Bend kid who never asked to be called the inventor of online community.