The first Bulletin Board system is created and Wikipedia is founded. All on today’s On This Day from TEST Huddle.
1978 – The World’s first bulletin Board
A snowstorm in Chicago in 1978 led to the development of the first bulletin board, the precursor of online communities today. While snowed in during the storm, Ward Christensen begins preliminary work on what will become Computer Bulletin Board System (CBBS), the first Bulletin Board System. The bulletin board will be created in collaboration with his friend Randy Suess. The entire system is conceived, designed, programmed, debugged, and tested in thirty days and is completed by February 16th 1978.
2001 – Wikipedia founded
On this day in 2001, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launch Wikipedia with the post of its first entry. The web-based, collaborative, multilingual, free encyclopedia, begins life as a complementary project to Nupedia, a free online encyclopedia that features articles written by experts and formally reviewed. However Wikipedia will rapidly outpace Nupedia in terms of popularity. By the end of 2001, Wikipedia will grow to include approximately twenty thousand articles spread across eighteen languages. Currently there are million articles. The name “Wikipedia” was coined by Larry Sanger; it’s a portmanteau of the words “wiki” and “encyclopedia. There is currently 4.6 million English language articles on Wikipedia.
Images: Wikipedia
