In June 1975 the fourth newsletter of a club in Menlo Park, California, told its members what they were for. “Yes, a hobby for fun. Interest in home computing is spreading fast,” wrote its editor, Fred Moore. “There are a lot of obstacles, bugs, and technical tricky problems which can frustrate and discourage a person alone. By sharing our experience and exchanging tips we advance the state of the art and make low cost home computing possible for more folks. Bring your beast in for a demo!” The club was the Homebrew Computer Club, and BYTE reprinted the newsletter in its first issue. For the next twenty years, people who bought a home computer and got stuck could go to the same kind of place: a user group, meeting once a week or once a month in whatever room a member could borrow.
Fast facts
- The name: borrowed from mainframe customers’ associations, the first of them SHARE, formed by IBM users in 1955.
- First microcomputer clubs: the Homebrew Computer Club, 1975; by the early 1980s there were clubs for most machines in most countries.
- What they did: meetings, newsletters, software libraries, telephone helplines, group discounts.
- Cost: in Britain in 1992, from nothing to £30 a year; some clubs charged by the evening.
- Structure: independent local clubs, national groups with regional branches, and groups for a single program.
- Decline: from the late 1980s, as magazines, online services and the internet took over their work. The Boston Computer Society, one of the largest, closed in 1996.
Where the name came from
User groups were older than home computers. In August 1955 customers of IBM’s 701 and 704 computers met in Santa Monica to share the programs they had written, and called their group SHARE. “SHARE: it’s not an acronym, it’s what we do,” the organisation still says. Microcomputer owners took over the name, and the idea of pooling programs, twenty years later.
Clubs everywhere
By the early 1980s every popular machine had its clubs. In December 1982 Sinclair User printed a directory of ZX80 and ZX81 users’ clubs. In Britain there were clubs in Aylesbury, Doncaster, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Keighley, Orpington, Perth and Swindon, among others; the Inverclyde ZX-81 Users’ Club met every other Monday at the Greenock Society of the Deaf, and the Perth and District Amateur Computer Society at the Hunters Lodge Motel in Bankfoot. Sinclair’s machine had taken the idea abroad too. The same page listed clubs in Belgium, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Ireland, Spain, South Africa, the United States, Singapore and Jakarta, Indonesia, including a Danish group that offered free membership and a free magazine to anyone interested.
BYTE ran a monthly column, “Clubs and Newsletters”, for American clubs and anyone else who wrote in. In August 1983 it reported that the South Eastern Michigan Computer Organization (SEMCO) met monthly and that $10 a year bought its newsletter, Data Bus. In December it listed Chicago’s First Osborne Group, which produced “a monthly newsletter entitled PIP” with interviews, software reviews and a bulletin-board service, and a ZX Club that met twice a month in New Delhi “to exchange the news and solve problems encountered by users of the ZX81”, whose members had written a music program for the machine.
The biggest of the American groups grew out of one teenager’s idea. The Boston Computer Society was founded in 1977 by Jonathan Rotenberg when he was 13. By January 1982 it was, as Radio Shack’s Jon Shirley put it, “one of the largest in the country”, publishing its own magazine, and a forum it held in October 1981 brought together the presidents of Apple, Commodore and Microsoft and representatives of Atari, Sinclair and IBM.
How you found one
Magazines were how newcomers found a club. In most issues from October 1991 into 1994 Amiga Shopper ran a User Groups directory, “Find your local group”, with a coupon at the foot of the page:
If you run a user group which isn’t listed on this page, fill in the form below for your free entry.
The March 1992 directory is a good cross-section.
They met wherever a member could get a room. The Independent Commodore Products Users’ Group (ICPUG) met at Biggin Hill Library most Thursdays. The Chester-le-Street 16-Bit Computer Club used the ground-floor function suite of the Civic Centre on Monday evenings. ICPUG’s branches met at the Harlequin Club in Macclesfield every Tuesday, at the Holyhead Unemployed Workers Club on Anglesey, at the Radix Training Centre in Ayr, at Cox Green Community Centre near Maidenhead, at the GEC Aerospace sports and social club in Titchfield and at the White Horse Inn near Wakefield, where the West Riding branch also offered a minibus to the London computer shows.
Joining cost between nothing and £30. Many groups were free. The Avon Micro Computer Club asked £3 a year, the Northern Ireland Amiga User £5, Amigamania £7, Club Amiga and the Champion PD Club £10, and the Amiga Musicians’ Club £30, which bought “a disk with 50 IFF samples a month for 12 months”. The Amiga Beginners’ Club in Limavady charged “£2 for a single disk, or £20 for every issue” of its club disk. Some charged at the door: the Kent Youth Computer Group took “30p entry/evening”, and the Wrexham District Computer Club charged 10p to join “plus 50p to get in”.
Membership bought shared services. Public-domain software libraries, club disks and disk magazines, printed newsletters, a bulletin board, discounts on hardware and software, free small ads and a DTP scanning service. Club Amiga offered “a 24-hr telephone helpline service”; Dublin ICPUG, which covered all of Ireland, sent out a 36-page newsletter.
Branches and specialists
The directory shows two kinds of group that “local computer club” misses.
National groups with local branches. ICPUG appeared once as a national entry, with “lecture nights and open nights where members can get help. See also regional entries”, and then as more than a dozen branches, from Anglesey, Ayr and Buxton to Dublin, Stevenage, Watford and Wigan. It also had a 1520 Plotter Group and a Disabled Group. Its own advertisement offered membership for £19 a year, with six 100-page magazines, for “all CBM machines and PC compatibles”.
Groups for a single program or task. By 1992 the same page listed an Amiga Artists Club, an Amiga Musicians’ Club, an Amiga Video Producers’ Group, an AMOS Programmers’ Exchange and a separate AMOS User Group, a Basic Programmers’ Group, a CanDo User Group, a CDTV Users Club, a Public Domain User Group, and an Imagine Users’ Group “to encourage use of Imagine and other ray tracers”, with its own object library.
Some groups set their own rules about copying. The Amiga Artists Club, a club “for Amiga artists, musicians and coders for mutual assistance and programming demos”, ended its entry: “Pirates not welcome.” A club in Hastings described itself as “dedicated to being computer enthusiasts without being pirates”.
The directory reached past Britain. Alongside entries from Limavady, Ballymena, Glasgow and Carnoustie sat Comp-U-Pal, an “Australian user group for users in the outback. Newsletter, phone helpline, PD library. Membership A$24”, listed in a British magazine for readers who would join by post.
Decline
The clubs’ work was teaching, and as computers became ordinary the need shrank. In March 1986 Don Rhodes, writing in the newsletter of the South Bay Users Group, which met at Cupertino Library in the heart of Silicon Valley, noted that the nearby Silicon Valley Computer Society had fallen from about 200 members to 150 while the Boston Computer Society, with special interest groups for individual programs and machines, was “going strong”. “The hey day of users groups hasn’t passed,” he wrote, but their role had changed from “how the chips work” to “how does a computer work”.
Online services and the internet then did much of what the clubs had done. The Boston Computer Society reached about 32,000 members in the early 1990s, but by 1996 it had 18,000 and was losing money, and that September its board voted to close it. “When I joined the BCS, the mission was to demystify computers,” one board member told the Boston Globe. “Computers are demystified.” Some groups outlived the need. The Toronto PET Users Group, founded in 1978 for owners of the Commodore PET, still meets every month from September to June and holds an annual show, the World of Commodore.
Sources
- BYTE issue 1, September 1975, p. 40: the Homebrew Computer Club Newsletter, issue number four, 7 June 1975, edited by Fred Moore (“It’s a hobby”).
- SHARE, “65 years of shared history and knowledge”, SHARE blog, 2020 (web; the organisation’s own history): the first meeting in Santa Monica in August 1955, the IBM 701 and 704, the motto. https://blog.share.org/Article/65-years-of-shared-history-and-knowledge
- “SHARE (computing)”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): SHARE founded in 1955 by IBM 701 and 704 users in Los Angeles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHARE_(computing)
- Sinclair User issue 9, December 1982, p. 10: directory of ZX80 and ZX81 users’ clubs in Britain and overseas.
- BYTE volume 8 issue 8, August 1983, p. 490, and volume 8 issue 12, December 1983, p. 546: “Clubs and Newsletters” (SEMCO and Data Bus; Chicago’s First Osborne Group and PIP; the New Delhi ZX Club).
- Jon Shirley, “View From the Seventh Floor”, TRS-80 Microcomputer News volume 4 issue 1, January 1982, p. 4: the Boston Computer Society, its founder’s age, its size and its forum.
- Amiga Shopper issues 6–35 (October 1991 to March 1994): the User Groups directory and its coupon.
- Amiga Shopper issue 11, March 1992, pp. 150–151: the directory entries quoted (venues, fees, services, ICPUG and its branches, the specialist groups, the Amiga Artists Club, the Hastings club, Comp-U-Pal) and ICPUG’s advertisement.
- Don Rhodes, “Computer Users’ Groups”, Dynamic Memories (newsletter of the South Bay Users Group), March 1986, p. 4: the Silicon Valley Computer Society’s membership, the Boston Computer Society’s special interest groups, the changing role of user groups.
- Hiawatha Bray, “Logging off: Boston Computer Society to fold”, Boston Globe, 12 September 1996 (web, secondary copy): founding in 1977, 32,000 members at the peak and 18,000 in 1996, the losses, Louise Sacco’s quotation, online services and the internet. http://www.dtvgroup.com/BCS/BCS_To_Fold_Globe19960912.html
- Toronto PET Users Group, “About TPUG” (web; the group’s own site): founded in 1978, monthly meetings from September to June, the World of Commodore. https://www.tpug.ca/about-tpug/