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
Context & Ripple Effects
Randy Suess's death closes out the founding pair behind CBBS, the first public dial-up bulletin board system. His collaborator Ward Christensen, the BBS co-inventor, died in October 2024, so the two people who made online conversation available to ordinary dial-up users are now both gone within five years of each other.
The obituary lands in a string of farewells to the pre-web era's builders: Joseph Lechleider, a father of DSL, died in 2015, [[a:924043|Compuserve's forums — once the premier destination for online conversation — shut down in 2017]], and [[a:880378|Donald Bitzer, father of the PLATO system, a precursor to messaging apps, died in December 2024]]. Suess is the through-line: the BBS model he and Christensen built is the direct ancestor of the social platforms that now dominate attention.
First-order effects
- With Suess and Christensen both dead, no living co-creator of the original BBS remains to give first-hand accounts, raising the stakes for oral histories and archives to capture the CBBS story while secondary witnesses are still available.
- Tribute coverage from outlets like the New York Times reintroduces the BBS lineage to a general readership that knows social media but not its dial-up origins.
Second-order effects
- The clustering of these deaths — Suess, Christensen, Bitzer, Lechleider — pushes museums, universities, and tech companies to formalize preservation of early networking artifacts and source code, since the community-maintained record is losing its authors.
- Renewed attention to the BBS era gives today's platform companies and regulators a usable history: decentralized, user-run communities preceded centralized feeds, which reframes debates over platform governance as a choice rather than a given.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, stewardship of internet history shifts definitively from its founding generation to institutional archives and historians, and the BBS-to-social-media lineage becomes the standard framing for how networked public conversation evolved.
- The succession of founder deaths marks a structural transition for the industry: the people who built the first community infrastructure are now entirely a historical subject, and the norms they improvised — moderation, access, identity — are inherited rather than remembered.
The trend: The founding generation of networked-community pioneers — from CBBS and PLATO to DSL and Compuserve — is passing, and with it the living memory of how online public conversation was first built.