Not sure we are the oldest, but we /might/ be the oldest still in
operation. Is GNHLUG still in operation? If so, they are probably
older. I was inspired to dig into my archives:
An early email from our founder, Andy Stewart:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sat, 26 Jul 1997 22:22:18 -0400
From: Andy Stewart <astewart(a)world.std.com>
To: "Worcester Linux Users' Group" <wlug(a)mass-pc.wpi.edu>
Subject: [Fwd: Caldera Inc. IT Forum]
OK, gang, tell the man what you think!
Remember, he is the gentleman who graciously donated the tee shirts and
CDROM discs from Caldera...
Andy
----------------------
Date: Wed, 23 Jul 1997 12:30:22 -0600
From: Paul La Fluer <paull(a)caldera.com>
Organization: Caldera, Inc.
To: astewart(a)world.std.com
Subject: Caldera Inc. IT Forum
Hello Andy, I hope everything is going good. I am in the process of
organizing a conference while in New York. My goal is to rent out a
large ballroom in a hotel and have all the usergroups in the area come
and listen to Bryan Sparks our CEO and other talk about Linux and
OpenLinux. There will be presentations plus a Q&A session. I would like
to hear your feedback on the idea and if your group would attend. We
would be giving away door prizes like OpenLinux Base and Standard and
handing out t-shirts, papers and OpenLinux Lite and OpenDOS to all that
attend. Please give me some feedback on this idea. I need to know soon
to get things set up.
Thanks,
Paul La Fleur
----------------------------------------------------------------------
An email about our SECOND meeting (that refers to the first meeting):
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 04 Aug 1997 21:29:13 -0400
From: Andy Stewart <astewart(a)world.std.com>
To: "Worcester Linux Users' Group" <wlug(a)mass-pc.wpi.edu>
Subject: Next WLUG meeting
The next scheduled meeting for the Worcester Linux Users' Group (WLUG)
is August 21, 1997, at 7 PM in the Gordon Library on the Worcester
Polytechnic Institute (WPI) campus in Worcester, MA.
We had a great turnout of about 20 people at our very first meeting last
month - I hope to see all of you come back, and I'd like to extend a
welcome to anybody who would like to attend.
I would suggest parking in the "lower library" parking lot and hiking up
the 102 stairs to the library (not to mention the 12 or so more stairs
in the library to get to the 2nd floor!).
For more information, feel free to send me E-mail at:
astewart(a)world.std.com
Look for the penguin signs! Hope to see you there!
Andy Stewart
WLUG
----------------------------------------------------------------------
I'd guess our first meeting was about July 23 or 24, 1997, or perhaps
the week before, July 16 or 17.
But maddog from GNHLUG forwarded this, which says "as always, the
meeting are free..." which implies that July 30th is NOT their first
meeting. If they had monthly meetings, that would place their first
meeting in June 1997 or before.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 97 10:28:09 -0400
From: "Jon 'maddog' Hall, USG Senior Leader" <hall(a)zk3.dec.com>
To: gnhlug(a)zk3.dec.com
Subject: GNHLUG - Linux Cluster meeting July 30th at Martha's Exchange
Hi,
We now have a venue for the July 30th meeting of the GNHLUG, with Loki,
a cluster of 16 Pentium PRO 200s, running Linux as the topic of the talk.
We will be meeting on the *second* floor dining room of the Martha's Exchange
Building in beautiful downtown Nashua. I will be picking up the speaker in
Cambridge that day and transporting him to Martha's for dinner, arriving about
1730 hours. For those of you who wish to join us for dinner, please RSVP.
The meeting itself will start at 1900 hours, with the speaker probably getting
up steam about 1915 hours.
As always, the meetings are free and open to everyone, and as a FINAL
enticement I will be handling out *free* CD ROMS with the V1.2 Debian release
for Intel on it.
M. Patrick Goda, a principal of the Loki
( http://loki-www.lanl.gov/ )
project at the Theoretical Division of the Los Alamos National Labs, a Beowulf
( http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux-web/beowulf/beowulf.html )
style computer will be our speaker. I have convinced him to present a talk
on the Loki project, one of linking together 16 Intel Pentium Pro machines to
create a system that has:
o high reliability
o high throughput
and generally 16-node IBM SP2 performance (over 1.2 GigaFlops) at 1/20th the
cost (about $60K)!!
Pat is a friend of mine that I introduced to Red Hat Linux when he was a
graduate student at the University of Hawaii (long story).
Due to the fact that Patrick is a rare find, I will invite the Boston Linux
User's Group and the Worcester Linux User's group to join us that night, so I
have arranged for larger quarters.
Some additional Beowulf pages are from my own alma mater:
http://einstein.drexel.edu/beowulf/Beowulf_concept.html
including exerpts from the original Beowulf story:
http://einstein.drexel.edu/beowulf/original_beowulf.html
Warmest regards,
maddog
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Nevermind, GNHLUG is definitely older by several years according to their web page:
http://wiki.gnhlug.org/twiki2/bin/view/Www/PastEvents
1996
When Where What Who How Many
31 Jan 1996 UNH Durham Linux Linus Torvalds 200+
1994
When Where What Who How Many
19 Oct UNH (?) First meeting Members ???
On Tue, Jan 14, 2020 at 04:13:25PM -0500, Richard Klein via WLUG wrote:
> What do we know about WLUG's history? If it really is one of the oldest
> LUGs, it might merit a Wikipedia article. It would be great if we could
> flesh that out, too.
>
> This article seems like it could use a list of LUGs:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_user_group
>
> On Tue, Jan 14, 2020 at 1:43 PM Dennis Payne via WLUG <wlug(a)lists.wlug.org>
> wrote:
>
> > The NatickFOSS group uses gettogether.community instead of meetup.com. I
> > don't know that it has gotten us any visibility but the software is open
> > source. I've been tempted to join meetup to go to Boston Indie Game
> > Developer meetings but have so far held off.
> >
> > The NatickFOSS group also gets a booth at the Science on State Street
> > event at Framingham State. It is a free STEM activity fair for kids. My job
> > at the event is to generally occupy the time of the kids so the other
> > members talk to the parents. First year I had a playstation controller
> > hooked up to my laptop and held it out to any kid that walked by. Last year
> > I brought the arcade machine assembled by my son's cub scout den. Any idea
> > if WPI does any thing similar? Even if it is something only for WPI
> > students it might be useful to alert people to the group's existence.
Hey Gang,
We've got a virtual meeting tomorrow here: https://meet.jit.si/WlugMA
Starting at 7pm until you know whenever.. I fully expect like our
last meetings, it'll go off the rails and we'll end up talking about Linux
and filesystems, and 3d printers and sci-fi and in general just a bunch of
nerds reveling in our nerdom.
See you tomorrow!
Later,
Tim.
--
I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their
constituents as "consumers".
Sorry everyone. We had more spam problems on the WLUG Mailing List
last night, and in the process of trying to remove that user I
accidentally removed everyone. I partly blame the poor Admin user
interface of Postorius--it has a "Unsubscribe All" button at the top
of the Member list even if that list has been filtered and says "List
Members (1)" due to the filter. So it is easy to misinterpret "All"
as being just the Members that are currently listed due to the filter.
I went through a backup of the member list I have from 2018, edited
the list based on all the subscription/remove requests since then, and
resubscribed everyone who hadn't removed themselves since. I could
have missed some email addresses, so I apologize if you have been
accidentally resubscribed when you shouldn't have been--feel free to
email me directly and I'll fix that. I could have also missed some
new subscriptions, so if you know someone who should be subscribed but
complains that they are no longer receiving posts, please let them
know to resubscribe.
I'm not sure if each user's subscription options have been retained,
so if you had set no email delivery or digest mode for example, you
may have to reconfigure that.
Finally, I have configured the mailing list to require moderator
approval for new membership requests and posts from all existing
members until I know that the member isn't a spammer. Over the next
few days I'll be going through the member list and unsetting
moderation on "known good" members.
I removed & banned the drive-by-spammer.
Here is Technocopia's website for those interested:
https://technocopia.org/
I like the idea of Hybrid meetings--some participants remote and some
in-person. It's hard to do well, though. Does Technocopia have a
videoconferencing setup with an in-room camera/mic system, projector,
and PC that could join Jitsi? Maybe we could help them set one up.
Hey Gang,
I just checked the website and Technopia is now open to the public. So...
not this meeting, but hopefully the next one we can have in person!
Please let me know how you feel about physical meetings. I'm amenable to
waiting another month or two if people are still weary.
Later,
Tim.
--
I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their
constituents as "consumers".
We've got a meeting tonight. We're online and jabbering away.
https://meet.jit.si/WlugMA
Later,
Tim.
--
I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their
constituents as "consumers".
Hey Everybody!
We've got a meeting on Thursday! The pandemic continues and Technopia
continues to be closed so we'll continue to meet virtually at our same
location...
I hope everybody is doing okay.
Later,
Tim.
--
I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their
constituents as "consumers".
