Ask HN: Were you in a computer user group, back in their heyday?
51–60 of 80 posts
Re: Ask HN: Were you in a computer user group, back in their heyday?
#52I 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!
Re: Ask HN: Were you in a computer user group, back in their heyday?
#53>It was a group of squatters, hackers, anti authoritarians, non-conformists and anarchists Sounds like a group of degenerates
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Re: Ask HN: Were you in a computer user group, back in their heyday?
#543 of us started the Kalamazoo Linux User's Group (KLUG) back in 1998 in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Still going strong today: https://kalamazoolinux.org/
Re: Ask HN: Were you in a computer user group, back in their heyday?
#55I was associated with a capacity planning user Computer Measurement Group (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.
Re: Ask HN: Were you in a computer user group, back in their heyday?
#56In Hack Club (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.
Re: Ask HN: Were you in a computer user group, back in their heyday?
#57I 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.
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.
Re: Ask HN: Were you in a computer user group, back in their heyday?
#58In 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…
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.
Re: Ask HN: Were you in a computer user group, back in their heyday?
#59BMUG (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.
BMUG here too. The newsletters (dead-tree encyclopedias) were amazing snapshots of the aspirations of 90s tech, very glad I kept them. There's an article about "creating your own Web pages", from 1995!
https://twitter.com/ridiculous_fish/status/11120498890960322...
Re: Ask HN: Were you in a computer user group, back in their heyday?
#60Amsterdam 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 membe…
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.