A Chicago phone line became the first dial-up bulletin board

The workload

In their own account, published in BYTE magazine's November 1978 issue, Ward Christensen and Randy Suess describe building the Computerized Hobbyist Bulletin Board System as unpaid, after-hours work by two people. Verified: the project was conceived, designed, built, programmed, tested and installed in a 30-day period, 16 January to 16 February 1978. Christensen wrote the software after mocking it up in BASIC; Suess assembled hardware scrounged, borrowed and discounted from local stores and a disk vendor, DMA Inc, which donated part of a controller and drive at 40 percent off. No employees or company were involved. The system went on the air from a new phone line in Suess's basement, and the authors say they demonstrated it at a February 1978 club meeting, where 25 attendees raised their hands when asked who could call in.

What the documents show

Verified, from the authors' own article: CBBS was built for message communication among experimenters, letting callers with a terminal and modem leave and retrieve messages; people with information to share and people needing it found each other, one of its stated purposes. The article does not describe CBBS distributing or selling software. Verified separately, from the operating site's own history page: it corroborates the February 1978 date, credits Christensen and Suess by name, and describes CBBS as precursor to Suess's later dial-up Unix system, Chinet, which by the late 1980s had 300 to 600 active users, mostly non-paying guests. Neither document treats CBBS as a marketplace; shareware disk distribution came from separate BBS systems adopting CBBS's dial-up model.

The operating cost

The BYTE article itemizes hardware sourcing rather than a total price: a processor card Christensen already owned, a free spare mother board, two reasonably priced memory boards, a terminal interface, a keyboard board, and a floppy controller and drive from DMA at 40 percent off, with other boards donated outright. The only recurring cost named is the new phone line; no monthly figure is given. Neither source states a total build or operating cost in dollars, which would require records these sources lack, such as receipts or 1978 telephone tariffs.

The stop condition

The authors write that they considered the project close to completion within weeks and planned only modest additions, such as a second phone line. Editorially: for two hobbyists funding their own hardware, the stop condition was whichever came first, boredom or a failed part, since the system sold nothing. The Chinet page shows the service continued for decades under different software, suggesting the project was rebuilt rather than deliberately stopped.

• What would a comparable one-person support channel cost to run for a decade, in hosting and time?
• Does a self-published operator history separate what the original builders did from what a later site added?
• What distinguishes a message board's stated purpose from later commercial use of the same technology?

CBBS was a message board, not a store. The distinction matters because shareware's disk-mailing and registration-fee practices grew up on separate BBS software, written by separate authors, using the dial-up model CBBS is documented, in its builders' own words, to have started.