Remembering the Golden Age of Computer User Groups (arstechnica.com) 55
Slashdot reader #16,185 wrote regularly for the newsletter of a small-town computer users group. Now they've written an article for Ars Technica reminding readers that "The Homebrew Computer Club where the Apple I got its start is deservedly famous — but it's far from tech history's only community gathering centered on CPUs."
Throughout the 70s and into the 90s, groups around the world helped hapless users figure out their computer systems, learn about technology trends, and discover the latest whiz-bang applications. And these groups didn't stick to Slacks, email threads, or forums; the meetings often happened in real life. But to my dismay, many young technically-inclined whippersnappers are completely unaware of computer user groups' existence and their importance in the personal computer's development. That's a damned shame... Computer groups celebrated the industry's fundamental values: a delight in technology's capabilities, a willingness to share knowledge, and a tacit understanding that we're all here to help one another...
Two things primarily made user groups disappear: first was the Internet — and the BBSes that preceded them. If you could articulate a question, you could find a website with the answer. But computers also became easier to use. Once personal computers went mainstream, troubleshooting them stopped being an esoteric endeavor.
The typical computer user group is gone now. For the exceptions, you can find an incomplete and mostly out-of-date list via the Association of PC User Groups, though online exploration may lead you to more options. For example, the Toronto PET Users Group (TPUG) is the longest continually operating Commodore user group. Washington Apple Pi is still going strong, as is the Triangle Linux Users Group. IBM's user group, SHARE, began in the 1950s and continues to support enterprise users, though it's primarily a conference these days...
Hopefully tech will continue to inspire ways to get together with other people who share your enthusiasm, whether it's Raspberry Pi meetups, Maker days, or open source conferences such as Drupalcon or PyCon. You also continue the computer user group ethos by finding ways to help other tech enthusiasts locally. For example, Hack Club aims to teach skills to high school students. Hack Clubs are already in two percent of US high schools across 35 states and 17 countries, with about 10,000 students attending clubs and hackathons each year.
So even if computer user groups largely are a thing of the past, their benefits live on. User groups were the precursor to the open source community, based on the values of sharing knowledge and helping one another. And who knows, without user groups promoting a cooperative viewpoint, the open source community might never have taken off like it did.
The article includes photographs of the OS/2 community's magazine Extended Attributes, the M.A.C.E. Journal (for Atari users), the Commodore Eight Bit Boosters newsletter, and the 1979 publication Prog/80 ("dedicated to the serious programmer.")
And it also includes video of a 1981 visit to the Boston Computer Society by a 25-year-old Bill Gates.
Two things primarily made user groups disappear: first was the Internet — and the BBSes that preceded them. If you could articulate a question, you could find a website with the answer. But computers also became easier to use. Once personal computers went mainstream, troubleshooting them stopped being an esoteric endeavor.
The typical computer user group is gone now. For the exceptions, you can find an incomplete and mostly out-of-date list via the Association of PC User Groups, though online exploration may lead you to more options. For example, the Toronto PET Users Group (TPUG) is the longest continually operating Commodore user group. Washington Apple Pi is still going strong, as is the Triangle Linux Users Group. IBM's user group, SHARE, began in the 1950s and continues to support enterprise users, though it's primarily a conference these days...
Hopefully tech will continue to inspire ways to get together with other people who share your enthusiasm, whether it's Raspberry Pi meetups, Maker days, or open source conferences such as Drupalcon or PyCon. You also continue the computer user group ethos by finding ways to help other tech enthusiasts locally. For example, Hack Club aims to teach skills to high school students. Hack Clubs are already in two percent of US high schools across 35 states and 17 countries, with about 10,000 students attending clubs and hackathons each year.
So even if computer user groups largely are a thing of the past, their benefits live on. User groups were the precursor to the open source community, based on the values of sharing knowledge and helping one another. And who knows, without user groups promoting a cooperative viewpoint, the open source community might never have taken off like it did.
The article includes photographs of the OS/2 community's magazine Extended Attributes, the M.A.C.E. Journal (for Atari users), the Commodore Eight Bit Boosters newsletter, and the 1979 publication Prog/80 ("dedicated to the serious programmer.")
And it also includes video of a 1981 visit to the Boston Computer Society by a 25-year-old Bill Gates.
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Re:Back in the day (Score:5, Funny)
There were great things about the 90s. But the best one was that I was in my 20s.
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RTFM! (Score:1, Troll)
Re:RTFM! (Score:5, Insightful)
The larger problem was that we didn't have documentation -- very little of it good, anyway. The fact that we needed to get together in person to discover how things worked was a symptom of the new industry's failure, not a strength. However, the fact that we got together in person to help each other speaks to the essential humankindness of the people who wanted to improve things.
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However, the fact that we got together in person to help each other speaks to the essential humankindness of the people who wanted to improve things.
Back then . . . folks founded a users' group to help others help themselves and each other.
These days . . . folks found a "users' group" to help themselves to the data gleamed from the members to sell to others.
But then again, the pool of users has changed dramatically . . . back then, computer users were an eclectic mixed bag of geeks and freaks.
Now there seems to be a whole lot of folks whose entire interest in computers is how they can scam money out of it.
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We get together, virtually and in person, to help each other. To laugh. To learn. Starting in the 80s on BBSes, I have made lifelong friends -- many of whom I never met in person. Some are geeks and freaks. Others aren't. ::shrug:: It's okay either way. We're all people. People aren't better because they're geeks, even if it means they laugh at more of my jokes when they are.
The concern about "who is using us or our data?" was equally important during the user group era. Back th
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Similar issue is around today, and I suffered from it recently. For example, if I check The Lua Programming Language documentation [lua.org] and paste some of the examples on their Demo page [lua.org], I get an error message "input:1: attempt to call a nil value (field 'getn')"
Of course, said documentation actually for an earlier version of Lua, but I didn't know that when I first visited the page - perhaps it was the first link that app
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On Slashdot, this is obviously preaching to the choir. But out in the real world people trying to learn about such issues spend a lot of time searching for information and making mistakes using devices and operating systems that record every move and error.
By holding these sorts
I do (Score:3)
In 1987 I was one of ten people who founded the Bay Amiga Club.
(The Bay referred to Hawke's Bay , a province in The North Island of New Zealand)
Re:I do (C.O.A.S.T.) (Score:1)
And I was a member of C.O.A.S.T (California's Original Atari ST uers' group.). I think the leaders had a bit of thing about the Amiga. They seemed to spend a lot of time talking about the ways that the Atari was better than the Amiga.
Re: I do (C.O.A.S.T.) (Score:2)
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I was mostly interested in word processing at the time. I had the rare monochrome monitor which had good grayscale resolution for looking at text. For my needs, the Atari ST gave a good bang for the buck.
Sound Differences (Score:2)
Um..I believe it had a slightly better sound chip.
Actually, nope.
It had a programmable sound generator [wikipedia.org] (basically a multi-channel with volume controle beeper) like most of the western micro computer of the time (except the IBM PC which had a *single* channel beeper). Beeper could produce a bit of samples but at the cost of CPU time (see speech synthesis on PC Speakers).
It's the STE which introduced DMA'd stereo PCM.
What it DID have sound-wise is directly built-in MIDI In/Out ports out of the box.
Which mean that it could straight be plugged into synths, key
Heyday in the 90s (Score:3)
Around 1994(?), I got talked into running for President of PMUG (Portland Macintosh Users Group). The group was well-organized, had monthly meetings, a (paper) magazine, a BBS (which I ran), an office(!), even (briefly) a tiny store. At its peak, I think we had almost 1300 members.
Times change, computers got more refined, people drifted away. But there were lots of people who told us the classes we taught (8-10 nights per month) made their computer experience much more enjoyable. Many folks continued to be dues-paying members long after they really needed us - they wanted us to continue to exist.
Ahhh nostalgia...
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Those were Now Software's halcyon days. The PIM kings of the Mac set. I'll bet they must have been guests of yours in those days.
I was a beta tester for them through many product launches. Of course, those were the days when being a beta tester meant signing an NDA and sending meaningful and timely bug reports.
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Come on, admit what really changed, why the computer groups are not that much any more. Online gaming versus gaming lan parties. Which was more fun, well, gaming lan parties shit all over online gaming, way better but people are lazy and lugging around gaming computers is a lot of effort and represents risk to your hardware each time you do it.
You know what kind of eatery would do well, stepford mum snacks train (like the sushi train except stepford mum snacks, mini pizzas properly done, small lasagne bowls
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I don't think user groups have gone away (Score:3)
I think they've just largely morphed into other formats. Email discussion lists, web forums, ... even IRC chatrooms. Nowadays there's just not a lot of compelling reasons to require everyone to all be present in a single location at a specific time. In fact, in a lot of ways having to wait for a physical meeting is markedly inferior.
It's still nice to have occasional meetups (under normal circumstances), but those can be annual or biannual. Those are still great for general discussion and bringing in guest speakers.
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Dallas still has several in-person. Just specific (Score:3)
In addition to the online groups, there aee still a lot of groups. They are just more specific than "computer user", because nowadays EVERYONE is a computer user.
Here in Dallas, for example, just in the specific genre of hackers alone, we have Hackersnest, OWASP, ISC2, and my favorite, Dallas Hackers Association. The DHA meetings are awesome.
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They haven't gone away. Look at the ham radio crowd, the arduino crowd, and the work done by the CNC and 3D printing pioneers. These latter groups took CNC and 3D printing from expensive, large, niche machines to machines you can buy kits for to build on your tabletop. Go to a farmer's market or craft market and you will find the CNC crowd there quietly making a fortune on crafty "hand carved" looking wood stuff. And the ham radio folks are using all sorts of homebrew computers for software-defined radi
VIM (Score:3)
Control Data 6000 series - VIM - get it? Name was attributed to "the senior senator from Brookhaven [National Laboratory)" John Denes.
Hell, now everyone's wristwatch outperforms a CDC 6400!
Fond memories of the 60s-70s BC (Before Cray, although Seymour was a part of Control Data back then.)
.
Digital Equipment Computer Users' Society (DECUS) (Score:2)
"DECUS was founded in March 1961 by Edward Fredkin."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Having my first computer hands on experience in college with a VAX-11/730, DECUS was my way to connect with the VMS Engineering team directly. DEC at least tried to listen, and often would. COMPAQ & HP / HPE turned it into a private CES, which failed much like it did. With HPE, until this year, it was three days of sales pitches in Las Vegas.
And although HPE announced that it killed OpenVMS, it's being ported to X86 by
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I was the tape librarian for the Smoky Mountain Area Users Group DECUS chapter (yes, the acronym was deliberate) for a while. Anyone who had anything good (scripts, programs, etc.) and was willing to share it contributed their work to DECUS for the twice-yearly symposia, and DECUS sent tapes out to the chapters (upon request? I don't remember). The chapter tape librarians would then copy the tapes (upon request) for other chapter members. One of the original "open source" software resources prior to the
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" a write-ring that you removed in order to write-protect the contents"
Oh that brings back a memory. I once ordered 10 write-rings from the local IBM office.
Only, it turns out I'd ordered 10 boxes of write-rings - my fault. Fortunately the IBM sales rep understood, and laughed at me, and took them back.
We had a pretty good working relationship - I ordered regular upgrades, he took me to an IBM-sales-credit-card-funded xmas lunch of epic proportions. It was the first time I'd seen a corporate credit card sho
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"We had a pretty good working relationship - I ordered regular upgrades, he took me to an IBM-sales-credit-card-funded xmas lunch of epic proportions. It was the first time I'd seen a corporate credit card shown to the bartender, and then the restaurant host. Good times."
Unfortunately for me, I worked for a government consulting firm for many many years. No corporate largess could be showered upon me unless it was by my own company. Fortunately for me, we had some great Christmas parties. One memorable Christmas lunch was at Fogo de Chao in Washington, DC, a Brazilian steakhouse. Meat, more meat, meat wrapped in meat, and all you could eat. Vegetarians had an equivalently splendid salad bar.
I do remember going to a gentleman's club for lunch with my Network General sa
In person user groups (Score:2)
Made more sense (computer hw/sw speaking) before the days of public access to the internet, and when you were limited to dial up BBSes or expensive pr. minute 'online services'
Now we have Youtube, web forums, real time video chat, and a massive database of information that didn't exist back in the pre-Internet days.
In person user groups these days would be more about socializing in person, rather than swapping printed manuals and computer disks.
It's simply how things are evolving, and it is much eas
One thing i noted. (Score:1)
People these days are not interested in learning, just have the issue resolved.
Hence why when someone makes a post asking for a quick guide (instead of simply asking how i fix this) with the intention of learning, instead gets a rude âoegoogle it!â And get sent off.
I do miss those more friendly days.
Re: One thing i noted. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Not really. Even a small hunter gatherer tribe had the guy who specialized in hunting, the rock napper guy, the trap expert, the tanning expert, the weaving expert, the medicine person, the geek who remembered the oral history etc.
Re: One thing i noted. (Score:2)
>Once upon a time you could know... >everything. This is no longer possible
I take it you are refering to knowledge
disappearing from the internet or being
locked away behind paywalls.
But look at the pwiity k1tTy do funny thing...knowledge, that's boring nerdy stuff!- or so says the LCD that the whole internet is being forced to pander to.
Re: One thing i noted. (Score:2)
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Not quite (Score:2)
''Two things primarily made user groups disappear: first was the Internet â" and the BBSes that preceded them''
The decline of Fidonet or other similar feeds was somewhat understandable. Not so much with USENET. UUCP was how ''user group'' feeds were propagated for quite a long time. The decline of Dejanews and the realization of Google [groups] that monetization wouldn't be effective killed USENET.
Before that, USNET was a very very effective way for groups to propagate data.
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It still is, for moderately savvy folk. Data that consists mostly of video files of the *ahem* intimate nature.
Fond memories of the TRS-80 groups (Score:2)
I grew up in St. Louis, getting interested in personal computers by 1986 or so. Pretty early on, the Radio Shack TRS-80 computers became the models I was most familiar with. We had a computer lab at school full of Model 3's and a buddy of mine down the street from me had a Model 12 or 16 (forget which) that his dad purchased for his heating and cooling business.
But I really got involved with them much more when I got a Color Computer 2. I made several friends with other kids my age who showed up at the TRS-
Linux Users Groups last to go? (Score:1)
I remember the old users groups from the days of 8 and 16 bit computers. Later, Linux Users Groups (LUGs) sprang up. The wikipedia has an article about them with a link to a list, so I guess they are still around.
The thing is, computers are so ubiquitous now that you just don't have the kind of clueless newbies that you used to have. Not in the numbers you used to have. Buying a computer was a big deal in the old days, expensive, there were various standards and types, etc. Now, almost everybody has a
The Magazines! (Score:1)
I wish I'd kept at least one of my old Computer Magazines from the 1970s. Byte was the slickest and biggest, but I also had a fondness for Dr Dobbs Journal Of Computer Calishtenics and Orthodontia which, when it started out, was at the other extreme from slickness, a tiny little desktop publishing adventure from before the first Macintosh came out. (Later it morphed into Dr Dobbs, a much more professional mag.)
What I would most want to do, is look at the advertisments in one of those old computers. There
Bringing Bill Gates to Detroit (Score:5, Interesting)
I was one of the founders of SEMCO (South-Eastern Michigan Computer Organization), which spun-out from a short-lived student group at Wayne State University in 1976. There other founders were fellow student Eric Cohen and Jim Rarus, who at the time was an IT administrator at East Detroit Schools.
I had built a wire-wrapped Schelbi H-8, and Eric a MITS Altair and we knew each other from Computer Science classes. Not sure if Jim was a night student or one of the non-students who attended one of the early student group meetings. There was clearly interest from off-campus, and Jim volunteered to provide meeting space at East Detroit Schools, and that's where the first meetings were. Jim was able to get permission for the group to gain access to an HP minicomputer at E. Detroit Schools, and Eric programmed a message board in BASIC - likely one of the few message boards that ran on a minicomputer rather than a "home computer". (I think the Cleveland group had a board that ran on a PDP-8 that a member had purchased surplus. I remember how kewl I thought the rack cabinet was!)
I remember we made a couple of "field trips" early on when it was only a very small group. One to Cleveland to meet with another user group there. And one to Chicago where we spent a day at the University of Chicago, where I vaguely recall demos of Plato, Hypertext, and hearing Ted Nelson talk. I think this was another multi-group get-together - it was fairly common at the time for groups to send "delegations" to other groups in nearby cities.
Meetings typically had announcements, a speaker who might be a member or a guest, and then breakup into SIGs (Special Interest Groups - terminology borrowed from ACM). Members typically brought in hardware to be shown-off, repaired, or debugged, there would always be a soldering iron, wirewrap tools, maybe a scope, etc. that somebody would bring.
The group grew like topsy, and we pretty quickly outgrew the meeting space at E. Detroit schools. A control-room technician at a Detroit TV station (WJBK?) was able to arrange the use of a studio that was unused on Sunday afternoons as a meeting space. When we outgrew that (not sure if it was the Bill Gates visit that pushed us over) we were offered the use of the Ford Motor Engineering Auditorium in Dearborn.
We had some regular repeat speakers, mostly owners of the local fledgling computer stores. Two of the most enjoyable were of those was Rick Inatome (Inacomp then Computer City) and his dad Joe. Joe was a semi-retired mechanical engineer who'd worked for the auto companies, and used timesharing computers in a consulting business, and he was keen on the potential for using personal computers in engineering and design. Rick was in the MBA program at Michigan State. Joe and Rick started Detroit's first computer store in a tiny strip mall in Troy, MI, when Rick was home for the summer, and Eric got a part-time job there assembling Altair kits for customers that didn't want to do the assembly themselves. We all spent a lot of time hanging out in the back room of that tiny store!
Pretty sure it was Rick who made the connection to get Bill Gates to speak to our group. While it was a great opportunity for us, I suspect it was a bigger opportunity for Bill Gates! How many auto company engineering and IT people were in that packed auditorium? A kaboodle! This was well before Microsoft became a public company (1986) and I doubt the average person on the street would have known who Bill Gates was.
I honestly don't remember the subject. It wasn't Windows, that didn't come until 1985 and this was way before that. So, it must have been some iteration of MSDOS. I do remember that his presentation was even more plodding and dry than it is today. ;)
What, you thought there was going to be some great pearl of wisdom here?! No, the guy was boring as hell, but we were still inspired! Somehow, the enthusiasm came through.
OK, seriously, he talked vaguely about the future potential of personal computers. At a time when
NOVATARI (Score:2)
I have a lot of fond memories of attending NOVATARI user group meetings as a young kid during the 80s and early 90s. My dad bought some shiny new STs and got me an 8-bit XE to keep me off his new toys. He hosted their Michtron BBS (ARMUDIC) for quite some time. I went to meetings regularly and hung out mostly on the 8-bit side. I learned a ton about computing from those guys and they really got me interested in programming and digging deeper into my machine. Used hardware was usually for sale and they
Washington Apple Pi (Score:2)
Wow, I met my ex-wife there at the Saturday gathering of BBS nerds.
COMMON IBM Power Systems Users 60 years and more! (Score:2)
That said it is absolutely more difficult to draw users together when competing with all the on-line content avail
Dumb grammer (Score:1)
"first was the Internet — and the BBSes that preceded them"
What a truly awful sentence.
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LOL Thanks for the chuckle. I hadn't noticed that bit.
Speaking of language use, are you continually bombarded with ads for Grammarly?
How come no-one seems to be pointing out the potential dangers of Grammarly?
And it's not even effective - they were advertising on a real English grammar web site
until one of their bods gave it a try - and found that it failed miserably at a few common
grammatical mistakes. I read that they suspended G's ads for that site.
It seems that it is as they say: If you're not paying f
Apple is EVIL! (Score:1)