Old Al's Snippets
First PCUG Encounters
When I retired some 20 years ago, I bought my "last computer" - NEC APC 3. It had a 10 MB HDD (Hard Disk Drive), 5-1/4 inch floppy and a colour monitor. Vow! No more white text on black screen! It ran under a type of DOS. The DOS interrupts, which form the main building blocks of programs running under DOS, were very similar to IBM-PC DOS interrupts, but all had different addresses. What was interrupt 10 in one DOS, was interrupt 14 in the other, and so on. This was a serious miscalculation of NEC. It made many NEC APC 3 programs incompatible with IBM-PC programs. It stifled interchange of programs and therefore ideas between NEC followers and IBM-PC devotees. It locked the two groups into an unproductive tug of war, as it were.
NEC APC 3 was an advanced machine for its day. It succeeded in cramming a "huge" amount of data onto a floppy - 720kB (kilo Bytes), whilst IBM PCs at that time were capable of storing only half as much, 360kB.
So NEC APC 3 had a larger floppy capacity than IBM-PC. Clearly, an advantage of NEC APC 3. Or was it? The majority of PC users of the day used to program. Since IBM-PCs could only read a maximum of 360kB from a floppy, in order to have some exchange of information, APC 3 users had to write their information in 360kB format, so that it would be readable by IBM-PC users. Not much joy to have a program that is not available to many PC users. The NEC APC 3 users' group of Sydney wanted not only to write to 360kB floppies, but occasionally to format floppies of 360kB size. But NEC APC 3 could format floppies only in 720kB format. A real inconvenience. Neither my friends in NEC APC 3 group nor I could find a solution.
One day someone in our group came across a leaflet of Canberra NEC APC 3 users group. It was immediately evident that this group was full of "geeks". And they had "kludged" APC 3 DOS so that the DOS was enabled to format 360kB format floppies on APC 3!
That was worth a trip to Canberra. After my arrival to Canberra, in the evening I went to seek Karl Auer at his home. The bearded, young "guru" happily gave me a copy of the kludged DOS floppy. The problem of formatting 360kB floppies solved, except that I never found out why so many geeks are bearded...
Karl explained to me that the Canberra group was moving away from NEC APC 3 to IBM-PCs and they were about to call their group of geeks, Personal Computer Users Group - PCUG.
That was my first personal contact with PCUG. The introduction was really a case of users, or rather geeks, helping other users, who were mere mortals, even "foreigners" outside of Canberra and outside of group. It was a living example of Free Open Source activity.
"Users helping users" is really very, very similar to programmers helping programmers. The latter is empowered by Open Source Programs - it is the main aim of Open Source movement.
Our own Open Source Program depository on our own server, TIP, is at
http://www.pcug.org.au/oss/oss.html
Until further notice,
username: pcug
password: member
Al.kabaila akabaila at pcug.org.au
web page http://www.pcug.org.au/~akabaila