I’ve been adding some old files from the Rising Sun BBS, that I found on backup disks a few years ago (amazing they were readable ~15-20 years later and that I had a drive that would read them!)
You can browse some of it here, and I’ll be adding more as time goes by, there are a lot of other files in the backups. I’m also going to try to put some of them in context so people know what is going on:
http://www.phonebook.com/old-information/the-rising-sun-bbs/
There are a lot of cool things in there, dealing with online communities in the early 1980s through the early 1990s and then on the internet more than BBSs thereafter.
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Something Rick Lambert wrote back in the summer of 1984 which kind of sums up the fun we had. Ran on an Apple ][+, and an Apple ][ clone from Franklin, a Laser clone briefly (I think) and an Apple //e at various points.
Rick died in 1989 (heart attack) and both Alan and I lost a good friend and all around good guy. Alan and I still keep in touch by email since we are 1000s of miles apart (instead of 30 minutes), although not nearly as much as we used to when The Rising Sun was up.
T H E R I S I N G S U N
—– ———– —–
The Rising Sun was born after the three SYSOPs met at
a COF luncheon. Dedicated to the free exchange of information between users
their motto has become: The Sysop provides the medium, the users provide the
message. This System provides a meeting place for modem users regardless of
the computer that they use. The Sun has 325 members right now and is
continually growing as new people call.
Together, Chris Riley, Rick Lambert, and Alan Lobel make up the
Delegation. Their BBS was the first local BBS to have such things as the
Welcome message, Boarderline, Breaktyping, Message Search, Stringing command,
Stats, and a Poll — to name a few. Todd Nochomson of the Billboard ratings
calls it “spectacular,” “unique,” and “The most active BBS in Broward County”
— facts to which the number of messages and calls can attest. Currently the
Rising Sun has 18 sub-boards, over 180 files, and one can access the BBS at
300 or 1200 baud.
As you can see when you call this Bulletin Board, new features and
files are added often to keep up with the users wishes. It is the most
automated BBS locally. The heart of the Automation is A.U.R.A. — a program
that creates the statistics file, backs up files and deletes users who have
not called in sixty days. This leaves the SYSOPs more time to spend on
keeping the board active, up-to-date, and as one user put it: “keeping it
the best board I’ve seen.”
The Rising Sun Shines!
at [305]-473-6348
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2011 Update, here is Rick in 1983 with my parent’s cat:
talk about some old memories. it was crushing to a whole group of us after rick died and alan just didn’t have the heart to keep the board up anymore. great to hear that some of the old folks are still around. i’m still in contact with quite a few of the ‘family’ and will be happy to point them in this direction.
Hi,
Yes, it was terrible when he died. I was in grad school in San Diego (UCSD) at the time and got the phone call…he was a really great friend. He and Alan were supposed to be in my wedding the following year, Alan did make it of course. I wanted to help Alan with the BBS, but being in San Diego was just too far to do it well. I hear from Alan every so often, it has been 6-8 months(?) now, but last we emailed he was doing well…
He and Alan used to come over to my parent’s house for holidays, they were great friends. I’ll attach a picture of Rick to the main post since I don’t think I can do it here.
Chris
p.s. The link has some captures of the BBS – I had copies of all or most of the messages for a number of years on some old floppies. Amazing fun…
i remember going to my first pride fest the summer of 89 with alan, rick, tinkerer, noel, greywitch, aldebaran (can’t remember his nick on the bbs), lana fox (has anyone heard from her)? some great memories from back then. 🙂 will pass this link along to greywitch, aldebaran/elowan, tale weaver, and a coupla others. i miss the old BBS days, particularly the rising sun tremendously. there were always intelligent conversations and open minded people to be found on the subs!
I always loved talking to Rick and Alan… Rick always used to say, “Vane Ving” how are you… on the phone. I got the news that Alan passed away from Toby when I was in the Navy, it was shocking and sad to say the least (I was in San Diego at the time.)
I miss the conversations and the great fun we all had on the boards.
Rick was a character. He and Alan were like older brothers to me. They genuinely cared about people, had fun using the technology to enable communication with people. They were always so enthused about new things we’d add to the software. I never had a conversation with them which didn’t put a smile on my face no matter what was going on. After my dad passed away, they were there – not that I had expected anything different – but they were amazingly supportive of me and my mom. Just two really great and caring people.
I recall the “Vane Ving.” Another favorite was when he’d have an issue with someone (which he was generally over within 20 minutes of having it), he’d refer to them as “the enema.” His other online persona with “Basura Blanco” was a riot too. I will have to re-read some of the stuff on the bbs captures at some point. There are a ton of people I haven’t heard from in years – Dream Weaver or KK (Kathleen Kennedy) in years either.
I don’t know if you know/remember, but Rick and Alan had some really nice salt water aquariums. They’d drive down to Key Largo or the 18 mile stretch on the way there sometimes and fill up big trash cans full of salt water there to change the water in the tanks. It always seemed like a huge hassle, but the tanks and fish were really great.
There are a few people from the boards who are friends with me on Facebook – Ken A, Tom S etc. Feel free to look me up (http://www.facebook.com/chfriley ). I think I still have copies of all the files sections from the boards on disk somewhere too. I know there were tons of “cheats” and stuff for games there…not sure if it is worthwhile digging them out.
I know this was kind of disjointed, but what the heck. 😉
What a great trip down memory lane. Gosh I was young!
Great memories! I look forward to reading through those files.
473-6348 is forever etched in my mind. I regret that I never met Rick in person (and still haven’t met Alan). At least, I don’t think I did. I remember going to one CoF gathering, which was (I think?) at the Bahia Mar (???) and I think Wayne was there, but honestly I can’t remember much else (this was 25 years ago, cut me some slack 🙂
I also wonder what happened to some of the other South Florida BBS personalities — like Lee Casler and others from the “Emerald Cavern” BBS, MaryAnn and Alan Page (“The Cable Box”), etc.
Toby, thanks for telling me about this blog entry. I had read part of this somewhere before, but it’s always good to see other people that actually remember those times. It was a lifetime ago. I’ll always remember my first…computer experience, that is.
…a.k.a. “The Snake”.
Talk about sparking memories.We were way ahead of the times. Remember, you when had to know how to use a computer in order to go online? Laugh, those were the days of playing POLECON, MUDs and chat boards. I remember 1200 baud was fast but 2400 half duplex was blazing. I could go on and on…but you know. 🙂
Wow, you are the people responsible for me wasting half of my youth. How many hours did I spend playing Polecon, and trying to find ways to buffer overflow Logicomm’s profile page to get free credits? It is with regret that I had no idea what any of you were talking about at the time, because I was 11. Much later, I remember spending hours on the Atlanta Penitentiary playing the ridiculous Transformer’s RPG– together with.. what was his name? Completely hilarious guy, who would get drunk and ramble on the BBS; later on he organized a massive protest against the shutting down of Mr Toad’s Wild Ride. I lost touch with him a while ago; I think in his last response to me he wrote, “do you email me randomly just to remind me how old I am now?”
I only remember JediKnight was my nemesis on 3057557172. I’d love to figure out what source code the game that was on there tapped into, for old time’s sake.