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.

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.

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.

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

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...

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!

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.

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.

Though of course, if that were the case I'd be cussing at how much they got wrong. :-)

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 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

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!

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

https://twitter.com/ridiculous_fish/status/11120498890960322...

Didn't strike me as a computer guy but I guess he is/was?

Bill

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.

Here's a link to our old site: https://web.archive.org/web/20110930172321/http://ubuntu-mas...

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.

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)

I guess robotics clubs are still going strong.

I went over, met my wife at a university, and have been happily married for almost 30 years.

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).

- 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.

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...

[2] http://www.secinfo.com/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Randolph_Hearst_III

Jonathan Bernstein

It’s still around in a way: https://www.awug.org/

I have no problem with Larry or fan clubs. They're just not my thing.

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 < 1.0 pt.

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

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.