*He was 74. A very typical cultural figure of the personal computer era. Like: I've got one, it's personal, I'll just do it myself. And then: "hey look, everybody," which was the end of that paradigm, really, because it swiftly made the machines social instead of personal.
It's the New York Times, as indeed it should be
Randy Suess, a computer hobbyist who helped build the first online bulletin board, anticipating the rise of the internet, messaging apps and social media, died on Dec. 10 in Chicago. He was 74.
His death, at a hospital, was confirmed by his daughter Karrie.
In late January 1978, Mr. Suess (rhymes with “loose”) was part of an early home computer club called the Chicago Area Computer Hobbyists’ Exchange, or CACHE. He and another club member, an IBM engineer named Ward Christensen, had been discussing an idea for a new kind of computer messaging system, but hadn’t had the time to explore it. Then a blizzard hit the Great Lakes region, covering Chicago in more than 40 inches of snow.
As the city shut down, Mr. Christensen phoned Mr. Suess to say that they finally had enough time to build their new system. Mr. Christensen suggested that they get help from the other members of the club, but, as he recalled in an interview, Mr. Suess told him that that would be a mistake because others would just slow the project down.
“Forget the club, it would just be management by committee,” Mr. Christensen recalled him saying, noting that Mr. Seuss had been a self-taught computer technician whose decisions typically came hard and fast. “It’s just me and you. I will do the hardware, and you will do the software.”
(...)
Randy John Suess was born on Jan. 27, 1945, in Skokie, Ill., about 15 miles north of downtown Chicago. His father, Miland, was a police officer in nearby Lincolnwood, and his mother, Ruth (Duppenthaler) Suess, was a nurse.
After serving two years in the Navy and attending the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, Mr. Suess held a variety of technical jobs in and around the city, including positions with IBM and Zenith. Like Mr. Christensen, he joined the new Chicago Area Computer Hobbyists’ Exchange in the summer of 1975. It was one of many such do-it-yourself computer clubs popping up around the country.
Mr. Suess and Mr. Christiansen built their electronic bulletin board using a personal computer called the S-100. After adding a modem that could send and receive data across a phone line, Mr. Suess soldered together some additional hardware that could automatically restart the machine and then load Mr. Christiansen’s software whenever someone dialed in.
“Randy pretty much built it from scratch,” Mr. Christiansen said. “It looked like it was put together with bailing wire and chewing gum.”...
