[Coco] RIBBS/OCN/BBS'

[Dean Leiber]

On Jun 16, 2007, at 1:07 PM, John Donaldson wrote:

> Dean,
>  Yep sure was a RIBBS for OSK. It was called KRRIBS, since I did  
> the port of it to from the orginal RIBBS on a MM/1.
>
> John Donaldson
>


I haven't played with RIBBS(or KRIBBS) or my MM/1 in a while now. It  
seems like the CoCo/OS-9 community on FIDO never existed because  
there is almost no information left, but they were a very active  
community. Anybody even remember the OCN? (OS-9 Community Network).   
People seem to remember a lot of the other BBS's (like StG, which I  
ran) but I haven't really heard anything about RIBBS and FIDO in  
quite a while. I've been trying to find FIDO OS-9/CoCo message bases  
to save for the CoCo/OS-9 archive, but all that seems to remain are  
the little pieces left on tetxfile.com (the Alan Weston stuff.)
Heck, I don't believe that there are ANY StG or AcBBS message bases  
left! Almost the entire CoCo/OS-9 BBS scene is lost to history. if  
I'm not mistaken, RIBBS was probably the most widely used BBS  
software under OS-9, and after that probably StG and then AcBBS.

As far as the OSK community goes, I believe that John's port of RIBBS  
was the only BBS package that was completed for OSK. (Kudos to  
John!.) StG had some beta software for OSK, but I don't believe that  
it was ever completed. I do remember running it for a while on my MM/ 
1, but the networking part was broken in that you couldn't transfer  
with the 6809 OS-9 StG network.  Without the networking, the whole  
point was moot. That was about the time the whole OS-9 BBS scene died  
a slow death as the internet took off. The StG nodes dropped off, and  
the last main 'node' was in florida before the network completely  
ceased to exist. I used to call in to warren's Oceanside BBS for a  
while to read the FIDO Message bases, but then the CoCoList  
eventually became the main source of contact for CoCo/OS-9 people.  
Ok, now I'm  beginning to feel too nostalgic and melancholy.

John, I hope you have that source code and binary safely archived  
somewhere!