In the beginning, there was a blizzard. It was January 1978, and strong subtropical gusts moving north collided over the Great Lakes with an Arctic jet stream heading south, producing one of the most wicked snowstorms in US history. The “Great Blizzard of 1978” dumped close to a yard of snow on some parts of Michigan, causing close to a hundred fatalities and half a billion dollars in inflation-adjusted damages.

Stuck at home during the whiteout, two Chicago-based computer aficionados decided to build a system that would allow them to communicate with each other. At the time, the internet protocol suite was still years away from widespread use, but advances in microprocessing had begun to bring computers out of the lab and into the homes of tinkerers. Early computer modems allowed one to “dial up” and transmit information over ordinary phone lines, and Ward Christensen and Randy Suess, both members of the Chicago Area Computer Hobbyists’ Exchange (CACHE), brought their expertise in writing software and tweaking hardware together to create a modified modem that others could dial into and leave messages on for others to read later.

The result, inspired by the physical corkboard hanging on the wall at CACHE meetings, is generally acknowledged as the first online Bulletin Board System (BBS), an early social network that prefigured today’s more familiar online forums and microblogs. As the media scholar Nathan Schneider puts it, BBSs were notable for “offering computer hobbyists outside academia and military-funded research centers their first experience of digitally mediated community.”