23 Oct
2024
23 Oct
'24
12:40 p.m.
Author is a general assignment reporter. Not young judging from his mugshot. Wouldn’t
expect him to cover XM modem too much as that’s for very technical people and wouldn’t be
relevant to his article. If David Pogue wrote the article then perhaps
All in all a very good article what did you say?
Sent from my iPhone
On Oct 23, 2024, at 12:22, Fred Cisin via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
On Wed, 23 Oct 2024, Robert Feldman via cctalk wrote:
Ward Christensen, Early Visionary of Social
Media, Dies at 78
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/21/technology/ward-christensen-dead.html?un…
Thank you for sharing that.
The author, presumably a heavy Reddit, TikTok and Facebook user, seemed to have never
heard about existence of computers before internet, nor about any computer to computer
connections other than internet. He does not seem to know about anything except CBBS,and
that solely because it "resembles Facebook".
"Early Visionary of Social Media"
It is an adequately detailed story of his life, and mostly about CBBS ("a forerunner
of Reddit, TikTok and Facebook")
A dozen paragraphs about CBBS, but XMODEM barely rated a mention, and even there, only
about its use on CBBS:
"In 1977, he developed a protocol, called XMODEM, for sending computer files across
phone lines; it was later used on C.B.B.S."
. . . "For decades, his license plate read, XMODEM."
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com