Randy Suess, co-creator of the first public dial-up bulletin board system, which was a forerunner of today's social media services, has died 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.
Context & Ripple Effects
Randy Suess provided the hardware muscle behind the 1978 Chicago dial-up bulletin board system that he and Ward Christensen built after a snowstorm stranded them from a computer club meeting — the first public system letting ordinary people dial in, post messages, and read replies. With Christensen's death in October, both co-creators of the original BBS are now gone within five years.
The obituary lands amid a closing chapter for pre-web social computing: Compuserve's forums, once the premier online conversation venue, shut down in 2017, and Donald Bitzer, whose PLATO system pioneered messaging features, died earlier this month. The generation that invented networked conversation before the web existed is passing out of living memory just as its descendants — Facebook, Twitter, YouTube — face their own maturity questions.
First-order effects
- With Suess dead and Christensen gone since October, no living co-creator of the first public BBS remains, ending firsthand testimony about how dial-up social software was actually built.
- Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube lose a human touchstone for their origin story: the man whose 1978 message board prefigured their core mechanics of posting, replying, and community moderation.
Second-order effects
- Obituaries like this one push the BBS lineage back into circulation, pressuring platform companies and archivists to document an era whose infrastructure — dial-up boards, Compuserve forums — has already been switched off rather than preserved in place.
Third-order effects
- The pattern across Lechleider (DSL), Bitzer (PLATO), Christensen, and now Suess marks the internet's founding generation completing its exit, shifting the history of social computing from oral memory to institutional record — and leaving today's platforms without living counterweights to their own self-told histories.
The trend: The inventors of pre-web social computing are passing from living memory into history, leaving the platforms they prefigured to define their own origin stories.