His father was a safety director at West Bend Company and his mother sold World Book encyclopedias.

In his senior year of high school in 1963, he created a computer that won first place in a science fair.

CACHE members frequently shared programs and had long been discussing some form of file transfer, and the two used the downtime during the blizzard to implement it.

[5] 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.

[17] 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.