Ask HN: Were you in a computer user group, back in their heyday?
I'm writing an article about The Golden Era of User Groups, and I'd love your input.
This idea came to me when I mentioned user groups to a young person who'd never heard of them. Oh no! It was such a special time of community support! Let's not permit the memories to go away!
So tell me about your experiences!
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 "just a member" which is fine!)
Your memories: How involved were you, for how long? What drew you to the user group? What made it special?
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.)
78 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 162 ms ] threadhttps://twitter.com/ridiculous_fish/status/11120498890960322...
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)
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.
Curious to know what the contrasts are of the golden days and modern day.
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.
The shortest answer I can give you is that meetups are usually for a niche interest, such as programming. Most of the original user groups were far more general -- anything about microcomputers (my first group, on an island off the coast of Maine, was run by a guy with an Epson QX10 and another guy with an Amiga), or anything about IBM PC or Mac or whatever. So the demos were pretty wide ranging and had more variety. You'd have someone showing a graphics application one month (Arts & Letters) and a software utility the next (Norton Computing).
Didn't strike me as a computer guy but I guess he is/was?
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.
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.
Unless you know that man to be a private person, you should mention his name.
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/
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.
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).
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.
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...
Can quote: Randall
It’s still around in a way: https://www.awug.org/
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!
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...
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.
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.
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
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinball_Construction_Set
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.
- 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.
I went over, met my wife at a university, and have been happily married for almost 30 years.
Do ask 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.