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.
Ask HN: Were you in a computer user group, back in their heyday?
41–50 of 80 posts
Re: Ask HN: Were you in a computer user group, back in their heyday?
#42I was in an Apple II user group in Brazil, mid 80's. It was called "Clube dos Applemaníacos".
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)
Re: Ask HN: Were you in a computer user group, back in their heyday?
#43My 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.
Re: Ask HN: Were you in a computer user group, back in their heyday?
#44I 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
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...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Randolph_Hearst_III
Re: Ask HN: Were you in a computer user group, back in their heyday?
#45Friend 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.
Re: Ask HN: Were you in a computer user group, back in their heyday?
#46>It was a group of squatters, hackers, anti authoritarians, non-conformists and anarchists Sounds like a group of degenerates
These groups are quite common in some places, actually. They can definitely have some real technical prowess to them, but the "anti-authoritarian and anarchist" image is like catnip for posers and entryists. I think you mostly see these groups in places outside the Anglosphere where the usual norms of civil society are not that well developed, or even understood by most people. So the very idea of average folks meeti…
I live in the Anglosphere, those ideas are slowly ruining our society. We are being replaced in our home countries by non-Anglos under the guise of "cultural enrichment" + economic benefit and our polite fear that some frizzy haired Afro-sexual will wag her finger at us. Last year Pakistanis/Asians raped 19,000 young British girls and no one will do shit. Everyone talks about the upsides, but never the downsides. There's so much more I can point to that is wrong with the 'system' and none of these so called hackers/anti-conformist will stand up for me. Also downvote me all you want, I'm sure that will solve everything and make me go away.
Re: Ask HN: Were you in a computer user group, back in their heyday?
#47Please 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.
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. :-)
Re: Ask HN: Were you in a computer user group, back in their heyday?
#48I 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.
Re: Ask HN: Were you in a computer user group, back in their heyday?
#49My first user group was Decus. I still have an original "flea circus" (aka field service) leather toolkit but it is missing the tools.
I'd love to include a photo of the toolkit... even just its logo!
Re: Ask HN: Were you in a computer user group, back in their heyday?
#50>It was a group of squatters, hackers, anti authoritarians, non-conformists and anarchists Sounds like a group of degenerates
This and your comment downthread break the HN guidelines. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here.
(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22277609.)