+----------------------------------------+
|    * * *  THE LIGHTHOUSE BBS  * * *    |
|         Corpus Christi, Texas          |
|        March 1989 - March 1996         |
|                                        |
|           SysOp: Lightkeeper           |
+----------------------------------------+

+----------------------------------------+
|         THIS BOARD HAS CLOSED          |
+----------------------------------------+

At 11:14 tonight, Sunday, March 31, 1996, the last caller logged off the Lighthouse, and I reached behind the desk and unplugged both modems. After seven years and 41,151 calls, the Lighthouse BBS is off the air.

Please don't dial the old number. Sooner or later the phone company will give it to somebody else, and they won't want to hear a modem screeching at two in the morning any more than you'll want to hear them.

Thank you. All of you. I mean that.

-- Francisco Schweitzer, the Lightkeeper

  MAIN MENU
  ---------
  [N] Notice        [H] History
  [D] Door Games    [F] Hall of Fame
  [S] Statistics    [W] Why
  [A] Archive       [G] Guestbook

+----------------------------------------+
|                HISTORY                 |
+----------------------------------------+

I put the Lighthouse up on Saturday, March 4, 1989, on an XT clone with a 20-megabyte hard drive and a 2400-baud modem I bought used from a fellow at work. One line, one node, QuickBBS, and a welcome screen I drew myself: a lighthouse whose beam swept across the screen, if your terminal program could keep up. Three people called the first night. Two of them were friends I had made promise.

Why "the Lighthouse": I'm an instrument technician at a refinery on the ship channel, and for most of those years I worked rotating shifts. On nights I could look out across the bay and see the lights. A BBS is a light left on for whoever's out there. That's how I thought of it, anyway.

In 1990 I joined FidoNet, and every morning at 4 the Lighthouse called our hub and traded the night's mail. All of a sudden a caller in Corpus Christi could argue about fishing tackle with a man in Minnesota and about Pascal with a woman in Germany, a day or two behind, for the price of a local call. People don't believe me now when I tell them how big that felt. At the peak I carried about sixty echoes: the big national ones for ham radio, cooking, fishing, programming and BBS talk, the Texas echo, and our own local one, COASTAL, where most of the real friendships happened.

In 1991 the second line went in, along with a 386/25 with four megabytes of memory, DESQview to run both nodes at once, and RemoteAccess, which I ran from then until tonight. Line 2 was the busiest phone line in Nueces County. From 7 until midnight it was busy every night for three years straight. Over the years line 1 went from 2400 to 9600 to 14.4 and finally to a 28.8 last spring, and the hard drives went from 20 megs to 120 to 540 to the 1.2-gig drive that's sitting in there now, warm and quiet.

Sysop chat. If you pressed C at the main menu, my PC beeped. If I was home and awake I came running, and with shift work, "home and awake" could mean any hour. I've had some of the best conversations of my life typed one letter at a time at three in the morning with people I'd never met, in a split screen, my half in cyan and theirs in gray.

Get-togethers. Four times a year we had a GT at a pizza place on the south side, and every summer a fish fry on the beach out on Padre Island. That's where you found out that Captain Bligh was fifteen and had braces, and that Night Heron, whom we had all pictured as an old shrimper, was a retired nurse who brought three kinds of pie.

+----------------------------------------+
|               DOOR GAMES               |
+----------------------------------------+

Legend of the Red Dragon went up in 1990 and never came down. Every day you got your turns in the forest, fought your way up the levels, made a fool of yourself at the inn and, sooner or later, went after the Red Dragon. Some of you were in love with that game in a way that worried me. Over six years the dragon was slain 211 times on this board, and Red Snapper did it 23 of those times by himself.

TradeWars 2002 was the other one: space trading, buy low, sell high, build planets, form corporations and ambush your friends. We ran fourteen games, each a few months long, and one corporation won three in a row until the rest of the board ganged up on it and burned it out of the galaxy. I won't say who. They know.

The final LORD scores and the last TradeWars standings will go up with the archive. See [A].

+----------------------------------------+
|              HALL OF FAME              |
+----------------------------------------+

GULF BREEZE
The first caller who wasn't a friend of mine, on opening night, March 4, 1989, and still calling at the end.

NIGHT HERON
Most messages ever posted on the Lighthouse: 9,812. The kindest voice on COASTAL for seven years, and the pies.

TIDEWATER
My co-sysop from 1991 to 1995. Kept the board running for three weeks in 1993 while I was laid up after my knee surgery and never once complained about the 4 a.m. mail.

CAPTAIN BLIGH
TradeWars champion, four games out of fourteen. Started calling at fifteen and now writes to me from his dorm room.

RED SNAPPER
Slew the Red Dragon 23 times. Nobody else came close.

WHOOPING CRANE
Our oldest regular, a retired schoolteacher who bought his first modem at 71 so he could write to his grandson in the Navy, and stayed for the arguments in the fishing echo.

SPOONBILL
Our youngest regular, twelve when he first called. Wrote the door menu I used for five years. Now in college studying computer science, which surprised nobody.

SHRIMP BOAT
Most files uploaded: 1,140 of them, and nearly every one worth having.

DUNE BUGGY
Most calls by one person: 2,961. Usually right at 6:01 a.m., the minute the time limits reset.

SAND DOLLAR
The last caller, tonight, 10:31 to 11:14 p.m. We said goodbye in the chat window. Then I unplugged.

+----------------------------------------+
|            FINAL STATISTICS            |
+----------------------------------------+
| Calls by year:                         |
|                                        |
|   1989 (from Mar. 4)          2,140    |
|   1990                        4,388    |
|   1991                        6,102    |
|   1992                        7,915    |
|   1993                        8,247    |
|   1994                        6,930    |
|   1995                        4,416    |
|   1996 (to Mar. 31)           1,013    |
|                              ------    |
|   TOTAL                      41,151    |
+----------------------------------------+
| Users registered, all time    1,486    |
| Called in the last 30 days       97    |
| Messages written here        96,240    |
| Files downloaded             58,330    |
| Files uploaded                6,744    |
| Red Dragon slain                211    |
| TradeWars games played           14    |
| Days off the air                  9    |
+----------------------------------------+
| Busiest day: Sunday, Dec. 27, 1992     |
|   (61 calls, two days after a lot of   |
|   people got modems for Christmas)     |
| Longest call: 4 hrs 52 min             |
|   (Spoonbill, writing the door menu)   |
+----------------------------------------+

The nine days off the air: four after lightning took out a modem in 1992, three when I moved the board from the kitchen table to the spare bedroom, and two I'd rather not talk about involving a cup of coffee and a keyboard.

+----------------------------------------+
|                  WHY                   |
+----------------------------------------+

Everybody has gone to the Internet. I don't blame a soul for it, and I'm on it too, or you wouldn't be reading this. Two years ago an Internet account in this town cost more than most people wanted to pay. Now there are four or five outfits selling them for twenty dollars a month, America Online mails a disk to every house in Texas twice a year, and on the other end of the line is the whole world instead of one spare bedroom on the south side.

The numbers say it plainly. 8,247 calls in 1993. 4,416 last year. A thousand since New Year's, most of them from the same dozen faithful. The echoes are drying up too: half the people who used to argue in the fishing echo are arguing on Usenet now. The Web is a wonderful thing. It's just not ours the way the Lighthouse was ours.

And my wife Doris has been very patient for seven years about the spare bedroom, the second phone line and the beep at three in the morning. She would like a sewing room. She is going to get one.

+----------------------------------------+
|            WHAT HAPPENS NOW            |
+----------------------------------------+

The message base archive, zipped, coming soon. Every public message on COASTAL since 1991, plus the final LORD scores and the last TradeWars standings, in one file you can download from this page. I'm going through it first to take out anything with a phone number or an address in it.

If you uploaded something to the file area and want a copy back, e-mail me and I'll mail it to you on a floppy.

The 386 is going to my nephew for school. The modems are going in a box in the closet, because I can't bring myself to sell them yet.

And if anybody wants to organize one more GT, I'll be there. Night Heron, I'm looking at you.

  [G] Sign the guestbook

Visitors since March 31, 1996:

E-mail the Lightkeeper: [email protected]
Last updated Sunday, March 31, 1996