31–40 of 80 posts
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.
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.
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…
I'm curious how many NeXT machines were on campus? Where did they end up (which depts)?
I guess robotics clubs are still going strong.
Sounds like a group of degenerates
Anybody in a modern user group? I know of Homebrew Website Clubs - https://indieweb.org/Homebrew_Website_Club I guess robotics clubs are still going strong.
>It was a group of squatters, hackers, anti authoritarians, non-conformists and anarchists Sounds like a group of degenerates
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And of course now its all been replaced by social media and the big guns.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.
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.