Club History
In November 1987, there was talk about someone organizing a computer club. I heard about it at the Radio Shack Computer Center, where I had several friends and, within the next two years would end up managing the facility. Seems a fellow by the name of Robert Earnest was placing an ad in the paper and getting the word out to all computer stores about the meeting.
On or about December 12, 1987, the meeting was held at the Meeting Place at the Greenwood Mall with twenty-two persons in attendance. Fourteen of the twenty-two were employees or owners of computer-related businesses and the other eight were, like myself, computer enthusiasts.
Some of the persons I recall being there were; David Oliver, Rick Frye, Michael Kunkle, Bart Anderson, Steve Boone, Rick Mitchell, David Smith, Greg Peck, and only one female, Ramona Bobbitt.
Robert Earnest, being a “take-charge” kind of guy and being the organizer of the meeting spent little time getting started. Robert announced his idea of starting a computer club for users of MS-DOS based computers. At that time, Windows was still in it’s infancy and Apple, Mac, Commodore, and other platforms were not popular enough to be included in the make-up of the club, according to Robert; no one present disagreed.
Robert outlined the steps necessary in organizing, the first being to elect officers. Robert had evidently taken part in computer clubs before as he pointed out the duties and need for a position called Librarian in addition to the normal administrative positions of president, vice-president, secretary, and treasurer. Seems the librarian would be in charge of the shareware software the club could accumulate, (on diskettes mind you, as the BBS was not included in the club for the first year or so).
Michael Kunkle, being a sysop of the “Rasputen BBS,” had access to several shareware/freeware titles and accepted the nomination and position of the club’s first librarian.
Everyone in attendance agreed that Robert with his dynamic presentation ability, interest, and knowledge as to what we needed to get things going should be president.
Following other nominations from the floor, the other initial officers were; Jerry Gillette, Vice-President; David Oliver, Secretary; and Rick Frey, Treasurer.
Greg Peck was appointed as chairman of the rules committee to come up with a base set of rules called the Constitution and a more detailed set of By-laws to set forth things like the purpose of the organization, what dues should be, meeting dates etc. Everyone in attendance gave a phone number to be contacted for future announcements as things materialized.
Within the next few weeks we met at Robert’s house and various places to meet in small groups to forge our first set of rules. Robert was, and still is I’m sure, a big gamer. I was awed at his Leading Edge system with the new EGA monitor that would display more colors than the CGA’s most common in those days.
I recall discussing and setting the meeting date (4th Tuesday), based on when most people would be able to attend, the initial dues, based on costs of mail labels, paper, copies and postage for correspondence, and administrative running of the club was set initially at $20 per person, and meeting locations were where ever we could find at the time, and the club name, Bowling Green Area MS-DOS User Group. We, for sure, wanted everybody to know we specialized in DOS so as not to attract any MAC or Windows users that would most likely cause confusion for those of us that didn’t understand and would never need to know anything about them.
After trying different places, our first regular meeting location became the Bowling Green High School Library, where we were welcomed at no charge, except for summer months where we had to pay a custodial fee since no classes were in session.
After about four to six months, Robert Earnest took a new job out of state and had to leave us. David Oliver stepped in and took the reins as president as the VP, yours truly, was not ready for what was involved.
David Oliver, an engineer at Eaton Corp., had what it took to pilot the club into the future. Member Steve Boone, a System Engineer for Tandy Corp., agreed to publish our first newsletter if we would get the material to him. Seemed he had knowledge of a new desk-top-publishing program called PageMaker and access to a laser printer. All went well for the establishing the club, now we found six or seven of us, considered then a big group, getting together discussing things like what is ASCII, how to format a diskette, and new shareware programs. “Where is everybody?”, we asked. Of the many at the first meeting, few took part in later club activities. We noticed that most of the ones associated with businesses lost interest. Seems they were interested in only the commercial side of computing and figured we had little to offer. Most of them were considered advanced computer users. Our largest draw were persons new to computers and novice users. This, understandably, is still true today.
We needed new members and didn’t know where to find them. We came up with ideas like running ads in the paper or Country Peddler, but soon found that was too expensive. The Country Peddler was reasonable but did not prove worthwhile. One month we even bought a copy of Flight Simulator at the best price available being mail-order through the Computer Shopper to give as a door prize. It generated little interest, but we saw that offering door prizes would be nice as we got bigger, but could not afford purchasing too many.
Word of mouth proved to be our best method of recruiting new members, and Rick Frey created a brochure to pass onto interested persons and place in key locations where people might see them. After all these years, much of the wording of that original brochure remains unchanged after numerous revisions. It has probably been responsible for more new members than any other recruiting materials we’ve used, second only to personal contacts. |
