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Ward Leon Christensen (October 23, 1945 – October 11, 2024) was an American computer scientist who was the inventor of the XMODEM file transfer protocol and a co-founder of the CBBS bulletin board, the first bulletin board system (BBS) ever brought online.
Christensen attended West Bend High School. In his senior year of high school in 1963, he created a computer that won first place in a science fair. After graduating high school, Christensen attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison before transferring to Milton College. He graduated from Milton College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in physics and chemistry in 1968. re: R/1ST BBS QUESTIONS (Msg 46394) from Ward Christensen to Steve Culver, July 31, 1993.
In 1968, Christensen was hired by IBM as a systems engineer in the sales office. Christensen would work for IBM until his retirement in 2012. His last position with IBM was a field technical sales specialist.
Christensen was noted for building software tools for his needs. He wrote a cassette-based operating system before and hard disks were common. When he lost track of the source code for some Computer program, he wrote ReSource, an iterative disassembler for the Intel 8080, to help him regenerate the source code. In 1977, he wrote XMODEM, a protocol to send computer files over phone lines. Jerry Pournelle wrote in 1983 of a collection of CP/M public-domain software that "probably 50 percent of the really good programs were written by Ward Christensen, a public benefactor." In May 2005, Christensen and Suess were both featured in . Christensen taught soldering techniques, until his death, through Build-a-Blinkie, a non-profit organization that hosts "learn-to-solder" events in the Great Lakes area.
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