Ask HN: Were you in a computer user group, back in their heyday?

Fond memories of pointless techno-factoids:

0. It's possible to instantly lock-up a system by trying to copy any file to one of the special IBM DOS reserved file names like CLOCK$ or some-such. COPY CON CLOCK$ or COPY CON > CLOCK$ ?

1. The giant capacitors of the linear PSUs held enough charge so you could flip a machine's power switch on-and-off fast enough without it resetting.

2. It was awesome to code on systems with actual IBM VGA adapters, and more challenging to code towards 286's lacking FPUs rather than 486's.

3. Floppy disks were terrible: slow and prone to developing errors if you looked at them disapprovingly. If you wanted something, you better make two copies because looking at a disk wrong would lead to corrupted sectors. Wares was a slow business back then.

4. 10Base2 was awesome so long as no one disconnected the line between nodes or either terminator.

5. There wasn't much open source back then. In fact, the prevailing paradigm led to pointless code hoarding for things that weren't ever going to be products. And, so much was lost and less exchange of knowledge occurred because of it.

6. There were some really artistic coders in the bunch who combined mod tracking and VGA tricks into awesome demos.

7. Oh and we had a "satanist" who I think was trying to troll society as much as possible.

8. I remember writing my own "rawrite" floppy image saver that could copy 5¼" and 3½" disks including DMF disks too.

9. At home, I was probably the only kid with my own computer on a UPS and networked access to an HP LaserJet 4. I remember there was a class where a final (test) could have one (1) 3" x 5" (7 x 15 cm) notecard worth of notes, and so I used WordPerfect and a 0.5 pt font to print out over 50 lines per size and 4 columns of text on each size. Thank you 600 dpi and youthful better than 20/20 vision! I don't think many word-processors (except a publishing system like InDesign or LaTeX) allow text in decimal fractions Without Dr. Thaw letting kids do their own thing for the most part, I don't think it would've been as cool.

IIRC, Nolan Bushnell visited my AP Physics class, although I didn't understand his significance to tech until later in life.

PS: I was about 6 and was taken with my family to see this random house under construction in the hills that had a castle theme. More enticing that whatever it was about, the steepness of the grade of the street in front of it seemed like a good place to launch a skateboard or see how fast my bicycle would go. :D Years later, I found out it was Woz's house. |-d :-B

I have been running the Tokyo Linux User Group for the last 13 years. The club was started in 1994. I was first involved in 2002.

We have an event once a month alternating between technical meetings were we have speakers and Nomikai's[1] (Japanese drinking party).

Its hard to say exactly how big the group is because we have a lot more users lurking on our mailing list then people attending any given event. Our events attract between 10-30 attendees, and they are mostly different people depending on the time and topic being discussed.

Open source software dramatically changed the way a lot of people used computers. A lot of open source software runs on Linux which made TLUG a great meeting place for a diverse group of people.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomikai

That said, around 20 attendees is a really nice size. Its small enough that its easy to host technical meeting or book restaurants but large enough that you have a range of different people.