
Ask HN: Were you in a computer user group, back in their heyday? - ohjeez
I&#x27;m writing an article about The Golden Era of User Groups, and I&#x27;d love your input.<p>This idea came to me when I mentioned user groups to a young person who&#x27;d never heard of them. Oh no! It was such a special time of community support! Let&#x27;s not permit the memories to go away!<p>So tell me about your experiences!<p>The basics: 
When, where, what type of group, how big it was. 
Your role, if relevant. (e.g. I was president of one group, VP of another, and on an international board of user groups... you might be &quot;just a member&quot; which is fine!)<p>Your memories: How involved were you, for how long? What drew you to the user group? What made it special?<p>Mostly I want to hear stories, anecdotes, and nostalgia. So please share! (And let me know if I can quote you, at least by first name.)
======
nothrabannosir
Amsterdam Subversive Center for Information Interchange (ASCII)

It was a group of squatters, hackers, anti authoritarians, non-conformists and
anarchists. They proselytised Linux and GNU software. I only visited some of
their courses, pretty basic stuff where they would teach about Linux usage,
HTML & CSS, some basic programming, etc. The audience was always a motley of
social classes and skill sets. The actual members seemed mostly Italian and
German (pretty strongly represented in the Amsterdam squatting scene, as I
understand it). They were real deal squatters, evac fights with SWAT teams and
all. Big fans of XS4ALL (the first dutch consumer ISP, and legendary for its
true hacker spirit).

The workshops would always be in these random squats. You'd have to knock on
some nondescript reinforced steel door, say a password, walk through 3 floors
of rubble, to emerge in a ramshackle room somewhere and learn about memory
management in C for 2 hours. It was quite an experience.

I thought these guys were the "real deal" hackers, though looking back it was
perhaps a bit form over function. But their dedication to individual agency
and resisting authority is something I will never forget.

They shut down in 2006, apparently. RIP.

[https://scii.nl/](https://scii.nl/)

~~~
narag
There was a similar scene in the early 2000s in Madrid. Diverse people, some
of them more political, some more technical, some trying to promote free
software. I'm not sure why it disbanded, but I got the clear impression that
unity was delusional.

Political activists parasyted the free software movement. They contributed
nothing, except the wild epic, while they used volunteers' work to publicize
their agendas.

I remember leaving a squatted house where Stallman was going to talk, when the
girl I dated was utterly disgusted with the hygienic condition of the place
and the squatters' children. That was the last straw for me.

~~~
AsyncAwait
I like how you ramble about how the political people contributed nothing
without realizing that free software, or at least the GPL, is inherently
somewhat political.

~~~
stingraycharles
There’s nothing wrong with that. The parent is talking about people who _only_
contribute politically (ie activists). There’s nothing wrong with people who
contribute free software with political motivations (GNU), but that’s not the
people that the parent was talking about.

------
geraldcombs
In the early to mid '90s I was involved in three user groups in the K.C. metro
area: the Kansas City UNIX User's Group, MacCORE, and the local LUG (which,
according to kclug.org, is still active). MacCORE was the largest and most
organized, with dozens of people at each meeting, guest speakers, and
promotional items from Apple and other companies in the Mac ecosystem. The
KCUUG and KCLUG meetings were more bare-bones and less formal.

I enjoyed the social aspects of each group, but they also had a huge impact on
my career. This is particularly true for the KCUUG where I served for a short
time as president. One of the attendees saw me speak at a meeting (on managing
an NNTP server IIRC) and asked me to do some consulting at a local ISP. They
ended up hiring me, but couldn't afford a Sniffer, which led me to start
writing a protocol analyzer for Solaris and Linux. That analyzer (Wireshark)
now has its own active online community. We don't have any official user
groups, but we do have conferences in the U.S. and Europe each year.

~~~
mapgrep
Very cool to hear that Wireshark has roots in a user group!

Personally, I was deeply inspired to start thinking about hypertext publishing
after visiting a UCSD Mac User Group as a high school student around 1992 and
seeing amazing HyperCard stacks driving multimedia on CD ROM.

------
wanderingstan
I was a kid in an Apple ][ pirate user group in Okinawa, Japan in the early
80's. My Dad was a schoolteacher on a military base there.

We'd meet once a week on Sunday afternoons in the High School cafeteria,
everyone lugging in their computers and boxes of blank disks. And what did we
do? We copied.

The club had massive binders full of hundreds (thousands?) of 5.25" floppies.
You'd "check out" a disk by replacing it with your membership card, make a
copy, and return the disc. More experienced members could help you get around
thorny copy protection, and people left helpful notes of which copy program
worked best.

They would also organize bulk purchases of cloned computers. My first computer
was referred to as a "Happle", i.e. a clone from Hong Kong. IIRC we got the
computer, a green-screen monitor, 2 slim disk drives, joystick, paddles, some
games, and a 9-pin dot matrix printer for $1000. At the time, a regular Apple
2 cost that much for the computer alone. Our clone also had helpful
modifications like lower-case letters and built-in keyboard shortcuts. E.g.
ctrl-6 would turn into "PR#6" which was how you booted from disk.

There's no way my parents could have afforded non-clone prices at that time,
let alone purchasing software. So I'm very grateful for that club, and all the
amazing software I got to try and learn from. I learned so much programming
from Beagle Brother's tools [1] and had my mind completely blown by the
Pinball Construction Set, which Steve Wozniak rightly called "the greatest
program ever written for an 8-bit machine."

[1] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beagle_Bros](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beagle_Bros)

[2] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinball_Construction_Set](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinball_Construction_Set)

~~~
anonsivalley652
In private elementary school in the mid 1980's, I remember LOGO and Oregon
Trail on Apple ][e's. For some reason, I recall the power indicator light on
the keyboard (an incandescent bulb?) would have a cover that would be missing
or burnt away, and hot and sometimes painful to the touch. Oh yeah, I went to
summer school once that had Pinball Construction Set.. it was one of the first
open-ended, sandbox-type games, a kind of "spiritual predecessor" to The
Incredible Machine series that really did UX well.

------
ci5er
Both ComputerLand and Radio Shack sponsored computer and robotics groups in
Gillette Wyoming from 1979-or-so, but I lived far from town so wasn't able to
attend much of it. I did hijack the local 4-H club with Popular Electronics
projects and ideas from Byte magazine. Until the IBM PC and Mac, everything
was 8-bit. Again, everything was remote, so I ended up getting into Apple-Cat
modem tricks (phreaking), running a BBS, and later (1983??) getting a used
PDP-11 and running UUCP (email and Usernet), for quite a few accounts for that
quadrant of WY for a while (using a Trailblazer 9600 baud modem - I had to mow
lawns for 6 months to buy that thing).

I'm sorry that I don't have many UG stories, because everybody was so far
flung, it was hard to be intensely (or interactively, at least) social about
it!

By the time I got to college (RHIT - Rose-Hulman), it was all men, all
engineering, all the time, so there wasn't much need for an independed UG.

I feel as if I was "in the culture", but not "part of the gang" for much of
that period. The WELL started about the time I was finishing up high-school,
but it was a lot of fun, and made me sad about what I had been missing out
on...

------
Mister_X
Circa 1984 or so in Silicon Valley, I was a member of ModemCycle.

To be a member one had to own a computer and a motorbike.

It was a small group of very diverse folks, really a fun time while it lasted.

The monthly Paul Revere rides were the most fun, we'd meet around 10 PM at a
Denny's somewhere and ride all night during the Full Moon, ending at a Denny's
somewhere else around 5 or 6 AM, then home to sleep.

Wonder what happened to them all, great folks!

------
arminiusreturns
I was the in the "Computer Club" in highschool, in the late 90's early 00's.
In retrospect it was quite amazing that we lucked out, because what happened
was a guy who had been working in the industry decided he wanted to bring
computing to his hometown, and so left the industry and used his contacts to
push for a top-notch tech center in the high-school. It was one of the very
first high schools to have the Cisco Networking Academy for example, so many
of us had our CCNA before we had even left high school. We were issued laptops
and cisco routers... which at the time I thought was awesome but it didn't
dawn on me till I was older just how much this one person had done for us
kids. It was he who encouraged us who ended up always in the tech center to
start the computer club, and do things like compete in the VICA (now SkillsUSA
competitions) and we regularly dominated.

It was under his tutelage I first installed RedHat linux, and he would have us
do things like CTF's with each of our issued routers/laptops to teach us
practical security.

Most of our events we organized ended up being basically LAN gaming parties,
but back in that day gaming required you to know some basic networking stuff
so it was also used to hone those skills. Once a month we would do all friday
night lock in's, mostly playing Half-Life, Team-Fortress, Quake, Counter-
Strike, or Unreal Tournament, and sometimes Starcraft/Warcraft. Lots of Jolt
soda, mountain dew, and Bawls combined with pizza.

Some really good times that I look back on fondly, and I often wonder what all
the guys are up to these days. I'm sure almost all of them ended up in some
facet of the industry, but it was quite fun to teach me that you can't judge a
book by it's cover. We had jocks playing football and the rest of the time in
the computer center with us. We had stoners. We had a handful of girls. It was
a very diverse group that broke the sterotype and I loved it.

I really am thankful to that man for bringing the future to my high-school so
that many of us had a headstart in the industry ourselves.

~~~
medymed
This kind of donation is an eventual goal of mine. There are so many other
often-well-funded focuses (sports and theatre) and myriad other social
activities and distractions during high school that many students never have
structured avenue to look into programming or CS though the
creative/logical/teamwork benefits are hugely diverse for those who get past
the entry barrier of learning a language or framework (even apart from career
impact).

------
E14n
The Tokyo Linux User Group

I have been running the Tokyo Linux User Group for the last 13 years. The club
was started in 1994. I was first involved in 2002.

We have an event once a month alternating between technical meetings were we
have speakers and Nomikai's[1] (Japanese drinking party).

Its hard to say exactly how big the group is because we have a lot more users
lurking on our mailing list then people attending any given event. Our events
attract between 10-30 attendees, and they are mostly different people
depending on the time and topic being discussed.

Open source software dramatically changed the way a lot of people used
computers. A lot of open source software runs on Linux which made TLUG a great
meeting place for a diverse group of people.

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomikai](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomikai)

~~~
fierarul
Wow, 10-30 attendees in Tokyo! It really puts things into perspective how one
should measure a user group.

~~~
E14n
Most of our presentations are in English which is a barrier to many.

That said, around 20 attendees is a really nice size. Its small enough that
its easy to host technical meeting or book restaurants but large enough that
you have a range of different people.

------
chx
Oh god, I am tearing up a little.

Do ask
[https://www.facebook.com/csokonaimikroklub/](https://www.facebook.com/csokonaimikroklub/)
for stories.

Starting some time in the 80s (1987? or so), in Hungary (this is behind the
Iron Curtain, mind you) there were many community centers. One of them in a
rather outskirts district have housed a "micro club" every Friday evening.
Yes, piracy was very important because getting legal software was near
impossible at that time for the 8 bit computers. But it was a community and
later when we grew up many of us staying with IT we learned a lot from each
other... I believe it stopped in 2005 or so and then rebooted in 2014 as a
retro computing weekly meetup.

------
dang
Please post the article to Hacker News when it's done! Email us at
hn@ycombinator.com and we might be able to give you some tips.

~~~
ohjeez
Oh heck yeah! Look, I'd post it to HN even if someone else wrote that article
and I just found it somewhere.

Though of course, if that were the case I'd be cussing at how much they got
wrong. :-)

------
RNeff
User groups provided assistance, shared knowledge, and shareware software
before there was the Internet.

I attended a PC users group at Stanford during the late 1980's. Mostly product
announcements and demos. A lot of I did this, you can do it too! People
selling shareware software on 5 1/4 inch floppies for a dollar: text editors,
simple databases, games. People were welcoming to newcomers, and helpful. IBM
clone PC computers cost over a thousand dollars without hard disks.

I also attended a couple of meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club at SLAC.
Mostly ego boasting. I missed Woz showing the Apple I.

Some of the BMUG CD roms and a huge batch of user group newsletters are on
archive.org.

If you are in Silicon Valley, there is a Vintage Computer Faire West on August
1-2, 2020 at the Computer History Museum. Lots of personal collections on
display, and CHM has lots of unique stuff. Demos of operational DEC-1 (Space
War!) and IBM 1401s (card readers, line printers, tape drives from 1959).
[http://vcfed.org/wp/festivals/vintage-computer-festival-
west...](http://vcfed.org/wp/festivals/vintage-computer-festival-west/)

Can quote: Randall

------
jshprentz
I led PFIG, the Potomac Forth Interest Group, in the early 1980s. Some said
the P was silent; others said the F.

We met monthly in a rec center in Arlington, Virginia to present member
projects and discuss Forth topics. After the meetings, we would cross the
street to continue our conversations at a Pizza Hut. Our roughly 30 members
came from Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, DC.

Most of us were running some variation of FIG Forth on Z80- or 6502-based
computers. Presenters would lug in their Commodore PET, Apple II, TRS-80,
Kaypro II, Atari 800, or other bulky computer and monitor.

Most projects were pure Forth software; some involved hardware connected to
serial or parallel ports. I recall several variations of Forth data structures
mapped to disk blocks. There was a Prolog implementation in Forth. I have many
of the handouts buried in storage somewhere.

On the hardware side, Forth translated English text into allophones and played
them through Radio Shack's Archer SPO256 Narrator speech processor chip
connected to a small amplifier. The system read Lincoln's Gettysburg address
clearly until one of the 8 parallel port wires came loose. Demos!

------
loudouncodes
Washington Apple Pi in the mid 80’s. Had no idea that would be thought of as a
‘heyday’. I was in high school and used it mostly as a group of people to get
software from...shareware and... otherwise.

There were also some fun bbs games like TradeWars 2000, of which nothing like
that exists today. I remember racing home from school to see if there were
still colonists left on Earth to take to my planets.

------
PopeDotNinja
Back in high school, my friends and I used to use the computer lab with
Macintoshes to play Netrek
([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netrek](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netrek)).
We weren't supposed to be playing games, so we'd pick the computers furthest
from the door. When a teacher or lab assistant walked in, they'd hear N
simultaneous dings as the N of us all mashed that reset button on the side of
the computer.

Not club related, but I also got a talking to when I printed a 300 page book
on the laser printer when printing on a single page was more than 50 cents.
And then there was the time I crashed the lab because all of the journalism
class students were logged in with the teacher's creds and I decided to see
what would happy when I changed her password.

------
GlenTheMachine
I helped form the NeXT user’s group at BYU in the early 1990’s. I was the NeXT
campus consultant. IIRC we hade 15-25 people who met, I want to say weekly.
Wednesday evenings I think. I was involved for two years, until I graduated.

The nice thing about our user’s group is that it drew both students and
faculties, NeXT building fairly powerful workstations.

My primary role was to be the “crazy NeXT rumors guy” before John Moltz made
that an internet thing. I would spend five or ten minutes every meeting
providing comedic relief, talking about funny things NeXT would never ever do
(warp drive, Bill Gates Terminator drones) plus one thing that I knew fairly
certainly that they were actually doing. I would make members guess which
rumor was actually true (which wasn’t all that hard).

~~~
sircastor
I'm curious how many NeXT machines were on campus? Where did they end up
(which depts)?

~~~
GlenTheMachine
Funny, I don’t really remember. We had one prof from the music dept, and I
think he had a number of them. I think a few in the “engineering technology”
department, a few in graphic design. Kind of scattered. The CS department, in
which I was a student, had none. We also drew members from the local
community.

------
mundo
My Dad was (I was 6 and would tag along), in 1980-84 or so. It was a group of
~20 other guys, probably the only other Atari 800 owners in a 50-mile radius.
They would get together once a month to show off new peripherals, pore over
type-it-yourself BASIC programs from magazines, brag about high scores in
Centipede, and of course, copy floppies. It was equal parts hobbyists club,
amateur mutual tech support society, and den of piracy (though it wasn't
called that yet).

Here's my story. There was one guy in the group, George, whose basement was
entirely filled with cardboard banker boxes. Some of them were packed with 5
1/4 floppies, and many more were Xeroxed documentation (both for defeating
"look up the thing on page X" anti-theft, and just being able to use the
software). By '84 I would guess he had 50k-100k disks, which probably
accounted for a good percentage of the total software an Atari could run.

The amazing thing about George was, he never actually used any of it. He
disliked games, and didn't really need business apps. He would get disks in
the mail (he used BBSes to meet other enthusiasts, but mostly traded via
USPS), fire them up once to see if they worked, file them away alphabetically,
and never touch them again except to make copies for others. He just liked
collecting, or maybe hoarding is the right term.

Anyway, it's my private theory that the whole edifice of pre-internet piracy
would've collapsed without people like George. Of course, people would've
still copied games with each other, but the 'scene' where you could find
almost anything, including older and less-popular wares, relied on
completionists pirating for the sake of it.

------
willjam
Hi, I was not in on the very early days of User Groups, I joined my User
Group, the Oklahoma PC User Group (OKCPCUG), in the early ’80s and I do
remember my club having hundreds of members and meeting in an auditorium for
our General Sessions. This club was one of the original ones formed that had
IBM in its name. It was later changed to OKCPCUG due to a possible lawsuit
from IBM. Microsoft, WordPerfect, and Adobe were the headliners. They gave
presentations that drew the hundreds and provided wonderful giveaways of full
versions of their software. You could always expect the introduction of new
versions of their products would be a big event. Much like the way Samsung and
Apple launch new hardware today. We had more than a dozen different SIGs that
touched on every aspect of computing. Our club offered classes that were
always full usually having a waiting list. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were
treated like rock stars. The club is still in existence with a much smaller
membership roster. The reason, no freebies and an older and dying members.

Bill

------
zachlatta
In Hack Club ([https://hackclub.com](https://hackclub.com)), we are helping
students start the modern equivalent of user groups in high schools. Hack
Clubs are in 2% of US high schools right now across 35 states and is now also
in 17 countries, with about 10,000 students attending clubs and hackathons
each year.

I started it 6 years ago when I was 16 and reading about early hacker culture
and the original user groups, desperate for a community. Hack Club is a
nonprofit, donor-funded, and completely free for everyone involved - also
nearly everything is open source at
[https://github.com/hackclub](https://github.com/hackclub).

------
tony-allan
I was associated with a capacity planning user Computer Measurement Group
([https://cmg.org](https://cmg.org)), also UK CMG and CMG Australia from the
early 1990's. CMG and UKCMG are still going strong. A group of CMGA members
still meet socially every once in a while.

Once I had done my initial on-the-job training, these groups were an essential
way to keep my skill levels up and keep in touch with a group of national and
international highly specialised IT professionals who worked across mainfame,
mid-range and now cloud environments.

Presenting at user conferences was a great way to share experiences and
maintain a profile in the industry.

You can quote me.

------
electricslpnsld
I used to be in the "Triangle Linux Users Group" in the early 2000s -- it
seems they are still active! [https://trilug.org](https://trilug.org)

Back when running Linux on the desktop was a full time job, it was really cool
to have an in person network to talk to when your latest kernel compilation
bricked your system or whatever. It was also cool since RedHat is based in the
Triangle we'd get people from RedHat coming to the user group all the time and
could get all the dirt on them.

------
pstuart
BMUG (Berkeley Macintosh Users Group) should be on your radar. I was a passive
member but it got me into the computing industry working for a well known Mac
networking company at the time.

~~~
spenrose
An important Google developer who created a product most of you use was a BMUG
member, as was a current Siri developer, a former head of MacOS ... devrel
IIRC, and others. BMUG probably deserves some credit for my own 20 year career
as a programmer.

------
fit2rule
I started the "Oric User Group" in Perth, WA, in 1983. We met about 6 times,
each time mostly spent trading tapes. I had a dual-cassette boombox that was
seriously pushed into service, and we also had "type-a-thons" where the more
competent keyboardists among us would type in magazine listings, which others
read aloud.

Was pretty fun, but soon enough we all started meeting on BBS'es, and moved to
other systems, and I got on the Internet and discovered ftp and gopher and
usenet. The physical meetings didn't seem relevant at that point.

Then, in the 90's, I got the bug and started a few other user groups, mostly
oriented around digital synths and other studio gear. We used mailing lists to
keep everyone organised and for a while there were tens of thousands of us, on
various lists, discussing all kinds of things. Lists seemed to work better
than USENET - not everyone that could set up mail somewhere had the chops for
NNTP ..

Some of the folks from these groups still meet up for a jam every few years ..
its indeed been a situation that we've all grown up together.

And of course now its all been replaced by social media and the big guns. Some
of our members went on to be quite famous and don't quite have the need to
cahoot with the riffraff, others have gone on to do other things, and indeed
.. some of us have passed away.

------
reaperducer
I suggest you put some contact information in your profile so that people can
get in touch with you outside of HN. People here use aliases because they
enjoy anonymity.

~~~
ohjeez
Thanks. Done. I actually thought it was there already!

------
tempsy
No, but one of the more surprising things I learned this election season was
that Beto was in a hacker group.

Didn't strike me as a computer guy but I guess he is/was?

------
JeremyReimer
I was the final president of the Panorama Amiga Club, a division of the
Commodore Computer Club based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Our last formal
meeting was probably around 2009, although I kept going to lunch on Saturdays
with three of the group's members until a couple of years ago.

I was never around for the heyday of the club in the 1980s, when they would
rent out the giant auditorium at Simon Fraser University, invite distinguished
guests like Jay Miner, and run daisy-chained rows of floppy drives
multitasking the mass copying of software. Back then I had a PC-XT that had
one color (orange) and one sound (beep), and had heard of Amigas and their
thousands of colors and multitasking operating systems only in whispers and
legends, as if they were inhabiting a parallel universe much more advanced
than our own.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s the group would meet for lunch every
Saturday at the Royal City Cafe in New Westminster, near the geographic center
of the Lower Mainland. That's when I joined them to start writing my series of
articles on the history of the Amiga for Ars Technica.

------
aussiegreenie
My first user group was Decus. I still have an original "flea circus" (aka
field service) leather toolkit but it is missing the tools.

~~~
ohjeez
I'd love to include a photo of the toolkit... even just its logo!

------
maccam94
I was active in the Ubuntu Massachusetts Local Community (LoCo) Group from
~2007 - 2009. We had occasional meetups in Boston, did some release parties
where we handed out some nice Ubuntu swag, had installfests at the MIT Media
Lab, and helped maintain some Ubuntu computers for the community in the South
End Technology Center in Boston. I don't remember how big we were, I think
maybe a dozen or so pretty active members and another few dozen lurkers? I was
disappointed that the group faded out a bit by the time I got back to Boston
after college.

Here's a link to our old site:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20110930172321/http://ubuntu-
mas...](https://web.archive.org/web/20110930172321/http://ubuntu-
massachusetts.com/)

------
thewebcount
I was a member of "The Northwest of Us", which was a play on Apple's tagline
for the original Mac, "The computer for the rest of us." It was in Chicago's
northwest suburbs (Palatine, Arlington Heights, Rolling Meadows area).

This was during the late 90s, early 2000s. At the time it was a great way to
introduce less technical users to the Internet and various computer tools they
might not know about.

The thing that eventually made it not worth my time was that as time passed,
it was more and more newbies, and less and less technical stuff. They
eventually spun off a programmer's group and I pretty much stopped attending
the main meetings and just attended the developer meetings.

A typical main meeting was about 3 hours long. It would start with anybody
from the audience asking questions and the techies would answer them for about
30 minutes. Then it would be followed by an hour or two of guest speakers
doing product demoes or sometimes members of the group presenting something
they thought would interest the group. It would wrap up with a raffle that
usually included a give away of whatever was demoed.

After going to these meetings for a year or so, it just became too much. 3
hours once a month on a Saturday is a lot of time to spend for what ultimately
wasn't much reward. I did enjoy meeting the people who attended, as they were
a fairly diverse crowd from very young to very old across a spectrum of
different lifestyles - high school and junior high-aged kids, moms and dads,
small business owners, etc.

In fact, I had my own small business at the time selling graphics software.
One guy I met there was a retired motion graphics artist who had worked on
news and talk shows in the 70s and 80s before they used computers for that! It
was fascinating to hear him talk about the methods they used to use. I do miss
making those sorts of connections, but don't miss the hours of boring product
demoes.

------
Tronkavel
I lead a 42 year old Mac User Group still going strong.
[https://www.wap.org/](https://www.wap.org/) I have a short video clip of Walt
Mossberg waxing wistfully about how his tech journalism career started with
early Pi sessions swapping components and software. May I share that with you?

Jonathan Bernstein

------
ACow_Adonis
[http://www.pcug.org.au/wp/](http://www.pcug.org.au/wp/)

It was quite a thing back in its hey day.

Had a shop front, a regular magazine, hosted a BBS, and held regular meetings
with door prizes (I think I won a mouse once). When the internet came along
they offered isp services and I remember connecting via trumpet winsock and
then Netscape navigator.

I was just a kid at the time, but I still remember reading through the
magazine when it came, and I think I may have attended some of their training
courses as a kid amongst the adults.

I don't know if they were affiliated with the computer fairs (semi regular
events held in schools and community halls where everyone came to sell/buy
computer and tech parts), but they were another pretty central part of the
culture at the time.

------
rbanffy
I was in an Apple II user group in Brazil, mid 80's. It was called "Clube dos
Applemaníacos".

~~~
guiambros
Ha, I was in "Clube do CoCo" for TRS-80 Color in Porto Alegre / Brazil, in
mid-80s.

Our main focus was CoCo, but a couple of folks had Apple II, and soon MSX
started to show up.

(ps: good to see you here! Hope all is well)

------
codpiece
I was in the Boston Computer Society. The one really interesting project was a
crazy Harvard professor who was installing Mac computers in Eastern Europe
after the revolution.

I went over, met my wife at a university, and have been happily married for
almost 30 years.

~~~
ghaff
Also re:BCS to get an idea of what a big deal it was in the day they got Steve
Jobs to basically reprise his announcement of NeXT in Boston’s Symphony Hall
for BCS members.

------
resters
I was a member of an Apple user group in the 1980s as a young kid. Things I
remember:

\- someone remarked how sorry they felt for people who had to type on IBM
keyboards.

\- someone explained the difference between a serial and parallel bus to me.

\- only one or two of the adult members had a clue about programming, others
were early adopters of various programs. Guidance on how to learn to program
or what to buy/read was minimal and unhelpful.

\- The leader of the group had cut is teeth on the Lisa and would mutter
comparisons about the Lisa when using the Apple machines.

\- The group met at the local Apple authorized retailer.

\- The early Apple enthusiasts were (in hindsight) pretty cynical about Tandy,
TI, etc. In hindsight I really think that was foolish of them.

------
bransonf
I’m not old enough to have been around in the day of the original user groups,
but I’m pretty active on Meetup these days, finding other developers in my
city using similar languages and tools.

Curious to know what the contrasts are of the golden days and modern day.

~~~
Insanity
Yeah same goes for me, I am activr in meetup groups and used to be in a "maker
space" for more hardware-oriented stuff. (Toys like drones, 3D printers,
Raspberry Pi stuff).

I am curious about the difference as well - my guess is that now it's pretty
mainstream so there's no real "group / niche" feeling.

Certainly feel that way about some gaming communities I was in in the early
2000s.

------
kickscondor
Anybody in a modern user group? I know of Homebrew Website Clubs -
[https://indieweb.org/Homebrew_Website_Club](https://indieweb.org/Homebrew_Website_Club)

I guess robotics clubs are still going strong.

~~~
dsr_
Boston Linux and UNIX Users -- blu.org.

------
ochrist
Back in the eighties I was the founder (and president for several years) of a
Danish user group for BBC/Acorn computers (called Quercus). We included all
computers from Acorn ranging from the Atom and the various versions of the BBC
and Master up to the new RISC based Archimedes computers. This was before the
internet, but we established a BBS and had a lot of fun. We had a reunion a
few years back where people could play with a BBC model B and a Raspberry Pi.

------
tluyben2
I was in two MSX user groups in 1984 and onward in the Netherlands. One was
for all kinds of usage and one was for ‘hackers’. I was teaching people at
both and learning at the hacker one. It was great fun dragging computers,
eprom programmers, boxes with diskettes and sometimes boxes with electronics
(like memory chips and soldering irons) to the crappy community house to have
a sunday of fun.

------
Stratoscope
I was fairly active in the mid-1990s with a Bay Area group called the Software
Entrepreneurs' Forum (SEF, later called the Software Forum, and still later
the Software Developers' Forum).

Alan Cooper [1] was running the group at the time, and two of their events
stand out in my mind.

Bill Gates spoke at a dinner meeting. Fran Finnegan [2] and Alan and I sat at
a front table. In the question and answer period, Fran started heckling Bill
about undocumented APIs that Microsoft used in their own apps. Bill said
"there are no undocumented APIs in DOS or Windows, and if there were, there's
this thing called the publishing industry that would find them and write about
them."

I was a regular contributor to Microsoft Systems Journal at the time, so as we
were walking to the buffet line after the talk, I introduced myself to Bill.
He said, "Michael Geary? I read all your articles!"

Will Hearst [3] spoke at another meeting about marketing your product and
company. As part of his talk he showed some TV commercials and commented on
them. The most memorable was "Points of View" from The Guardian:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SsccRkLLzU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SsccRkLLzU)

Besides being part of a newspaper publishing family, Will is also a
mathematician and at the time was an AWK programmer. (I don't know if he's
kept with it, but it wouldn't surprise me.)

Will's interest in math and programming was fairly well known in the SEF
community. After the meeting I overheard someone say, "I thought he was going
to talk about technical stuff, but it was just marketing." After all, why
would you want to hear about marketing in a Software _Entrepreneurs '_ Forum
meeting?

[1]
[https://web.archive.org/web/20190507180438/http://www.cooper...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190507180438/http://www.cooper.com/alan/father_of_vb.html)

[2] [http://www.secinfo.com/](http://www.secinfo.com/)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Randolph_Hearst_III](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Randolph_Hearst_III)

------
jamesjguthrie
I really wanted to go to my local 2600 meetup after talking to them on IRC but
my introversion/social-anxiety got the better of me.

------
silverreads
Friend of mine introduced me to his friend's step-dad who was a unix guru and
I started attending the everett linux user's group for a few years. We had
some fun over the years and made some fun projects happen. The most
interesting of which was a computer with 3 motherboards and one power supply,
and 2 of the nodes would netboot from the first.

------
joe_g_young
My parents were apart the Atari club in Eugene Oregon, US. I grew up with the
16bit, 32bit, the STE and the Mega STE ataris before stopped making them in
the early 90s. My parents still have them around. My earliest memories were
loading games off of a cassette tape

------
kirykl
Claris Works users group was awesome. They published a newsletter with a lot
of great content on both the software and desktop publishing in general.

It’s still around in a way: [https://www.awug.org/](https://www.awug.org/)

------
oblib
I joined a Perl user group for a very short time. I live in a rural area and
drove a couple hours to attend a meeting. It wasn't at all what I expected. It
was basically a Larry Wall fan club.

I have no problem with Larry or fan clubs. They're just not my thing.

~~~
lizmat
FWIW, I think you've touched on a problem with longer existing user groups:
they turn into meetings of long-time friends that like each other's company,
but have little to do with the original reason of coming together.

------
revicon
3 of us started the Kalamazoo Linux User's Group (KLUG) back in 1998 in
Kalamazoo, Michigan. Still going strong today:
[https://kalamazoolinux.org/](https://kalamazoolinux.org/)

~~~
ohjeez
What made you decide to do so? How did you go about it... posting flyers in
computer stores, or what?

~~~
revicon
exactly that actually, we posted a flyer in a computer store, I think it was
called "Cybertech" and had a couple ppl show up the first night, then a few
more, then a few more. We started having a table at computer shows helping
people install linux on their desktops, and finally we ended up taking over a
cybercafe and converted all of the desktops to linux. You could run a web
browser, play doom, it was fun.

------
joe202
Do you mean something like these:
[https://wiki.python.org/moin/LocalUserGroups](https://wiki.python.org/moin/LocalUserGroups)
?

~~~
ohjeez
I'm not looking for a list of user groups. I'm looking for people's
experiences with them.

------
mmphosis
[https://www.tpug.ca/](https://www.tpug.ca/)

------
anonsivalley652
My high school (Leland HS) didn't have a named group, so much as what would be
called now an extended hackerspace / "AP computer class" around the
mid-/late-90's. It was full of random PS/2 25 and 30, PC jrs and random
donations and casts-off. A lot of students were working on VGA/audio demos,
code, trading wares and writing joke viruses.

Fond memories of pointless techno-factoids:

0\. It's possible to instantly lock-up a system by trying to copy any file to
one of the special IBM DOS reserved file names like CLOCK$ or some-such. _COPY
CON CLOCK$_ or _COPY CON > CLOCK$_ ?

1\. The giant capacitors of the linear PSUs held enough charge so you could
flip a machine's power switch on-and-off fast enough without it resetting.

2\. It was awesome to code on systems with actual IBM VGA adapters, and more
challenging to code towards 286's lacking FPUs rather than 486's.

3\. Floppy disks were terrible: slow and prone to developing errors if you
looked at them disapprovingly. If you wanted something, you better make two
copies because looking at a disk wrong would lead to corrupted sectors. Wares
was a slow business back then.

4\. 10Base2 was awesome so long as no one disconnected the line between nodes
or either terminator.

5\. There wasn't much open source back then. In fact, the prevailing paradigm
led to pointless code hoarding for things that weren't ever going to be
products. And, so much was lost and less exchange of knowledge occurred
because of it.

6\. There were some really artistic coders in the bunch who combined mod
tracking and VGA tricks into awesome demos.

7\. Oh and we had a "satanist" who I think was trying to troll society as much
as possible.

8\. I remember writing my own "rawrite" floppy image saver that could copy 5¼"
and 3½" disks including DMF disks too.

9\. At home, I was probably the only kid with my own computer on a UPS and
networked access to an HP LaserJet 4. I remember there was a class where a
final (test) could have one (1) 3" x 5" (7 x 15 cm) notecard worth of notes,
and so I used WordPerfect and a 0.5 pt font to print out over 50 lines per
size and 4 columns of text on each size. Thank you 600 dpi and youthful better
than 20/20 vision! I don't think many word-processors (except a publishing
system like InDesign or LaTeX) allow text in decimal fractions < 1.0 pt.

Without Dr. Thaw letting kids do their own thing for the most part, I don't
think it would've been as cool.

IIRC, Nolan Bushnell visited my AP Physics class, although I didn't understand
his significance to tech until later in life.

PS: I was about 6 and was taken with my family to see this random house under
construction in the hills that had a castle theme. More enticing that whatever
it was about, the steepness of the grade of the street in front of it seemed
like a good place to launch a skateboard or see how fast my bicycle would go.
:D Years later, I found out it was Woz's house. |-d :-B

