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User Groups: Your Portal to Friendly Mac Support
It was around 1986, and I was in the seventh grade. My friend had an Atari 800 which he used to run a small BBS. His BBS served two main purposes, as a forum for us geeks that played Dungeons & Dragons, and to provide a place for the Rockford Area Atari Club (that's the name as close as I can remember it) to share files and tech support.
I, of course, had an Apple ][gs, and constantly flaunted the fact that I was using a nice, color desktop interface. I used my GS to log-on to his BBS and a group of about six of us used it to plan our various D&D campaigns and meeting times.
One gloomy Saturday morning, I went with my friend and his father to the Atari Club meeting just to check it out. I was amazed to find so many people of such different backgrounds all converging over donuts and coffee to talk about software issues and other fun stuff. This set off a light bulb in my adolescent brain (admittedly dim). Would there, could there be an Apple user group somewhere in town? When I got home I looked through the newspaper and sure enough found the meeting time of the local Apple ][ Users' Group (A2UG).
My parents were reluctant to let me go because I had caused some problems on their GS a time or two. The most memorable time was when my mother started screaming my name from the computer room, and I obediently ran in.
"You broke our computer," she said.
"How? What did I do?" I asked.
"Well I turned it on and now the screen is a strange red!
You must have broken it!"
Well, as you can imagine, I began to explain to her how I had changed the background screen from that boring bluish/gray to a nice red. I was told to change it right back, and only by doing so was I able to calm my mother down.
So once I was able to attend the Apple ][ Users' Group (A2UG) meeting, my ability to "break" my parents GS grew exponentially. Before you know it, I was programing in AppleSoft Basic. My first self-imposed assignment was to create a program that would generate the characters needed for our D&D campaigns. It took quite a bit of time, and when I had finished a jillion-and-a-half IF-THEN statements, my skin color had become true white.
Another amazing, yet simple discovery that the Apple ][ User Group brought to me was the existence of AppleWorks GS. Many of you may remember good old AppleWorks. Right now we have AppleWorks again, but before that it was ClarisWorks, and even before that, it was the original AppleWorks. The original AppleWorks was a text based application that ran on all the old Apple ]['s. Well, at some point around the introduction of ClarisWorks for the Mac, Apple released AppleWorks GS-and was it ever so nice. It was a graphics based Apple ][gs version of ClarisWorks that ran under the Finder in the GS/OS. It let me use nice menus for Fonts, Style, Size, etc. (no more ^B to bold things) and the print quality out my ImageWriter ][ was amazing. However, the next great discovery brought on by the A2UG was the existence of True Type Fonts, which made my term papers and assignments print so well from the ImageWriter that I thought it had magically become a laser printer!
It saddens me today to see so many Macintosh Users' Groups (MUGs) closing down. The "User Group" environment brought about my enthusiasm for my computer. If it were not for the Rockford Area Apple Users' Group, my Apple ][gs would have remained a thingee on my parents desk that took up space, and I probably would have grown up to be a baseball player or something dreadful like that.
So I beg you, like I once begged my parents: Please support your local Macintosh Users' Group. With so many new users with iMacs, G3's and G4's, the User Group needs to find a new place in all of our hearts.
Check out http://www.apple.com/usergroups/
and find out about joining or starting a group in your area and
maybe someday you too can break your parent's computer with a
spiffy, red background color.
-Andrew McVinnie is a MacMilitia.com contributor.
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