GNHLUG started in 1995, but was reduced to a mailing list about ten years ago. It no longer holds meetings. Every once in a while someone tries to resuscitate it, but it eventually goes into a coma again. I think BLU has been around a long time. It is what is left from the Boston Computer Society, and as such may have pre-dated even GNHLUG. md On Tue, Jan 14, 2020 at 7:01 PM Anderson, Charles R via WLUG < wlug@lists.wlug.org> wrote:

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:

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Date: Sat, 26 Jul 1997 22:22:18 -0400 From: Andy Stewart To: "Worcester Linux Users' Group" 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 Organization: Caldera, Inc. To: astewart@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

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An email about our SECOND meeting (that refers to the first meeting):

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Date: Mon, 04 Aug 1997 21:29:13 -0400 From: Andy Stewart To: "Worcester Linux Users' Group" 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@world.std.com

Look for the penguin signs! Hope to see you there!

Andy Stewart WLUG

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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.

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Date: Mon, 21 Jul 97 10:28:09 -0400 From: "Jon 'maddog' Hall, USG Senior Leader" To: gnhlug@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@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.

---

WLUG mailing list -- wlug@lists.wlug.org To unsubscribe send an email to wlug-leave@lists.wlug.org

The history of the UG, is an entirely legitimate subject for a meeting, I would say. History is important! --MCV. On 1/15/20 8:26 AM, Andy Stewart via WLUG wrote:

I'm sure if a bunch of us sat together after a WLUG meeting, we'd recall more stories and could, if desired, document the club's history. I think it would be a lot of fun!

On Jan 15, 2020, at 08:26, Andy Stewart via WLUG wrote:

WLUG's first meeting was in July 1997 in the WPI Library. Maddog was there, and our first speaker was Jim Paradis. We had 17 people in attendance.

I remember being at that first meeting, and it was a welcome change of pace after trekking out the Cambridge from Worcester for BLU meetings. Although now i live out that way and Worcester is a trek. Among feedback after the first few meetings, i recall Andy telling a story that he received an email from some poor old chap from across the pond who was driving all around Worcester England trying to find WPI so he could attend the meeting. I think after that, the meeting location was amended to include USA. - b

On 1/22/20 10:07 AM, Bradley Noyes wrote:

Among feedback after the first few meetings, i recall Andy telling a story that he received an email from some poor old chap from across the pond who was driving all around Worcester England trying to find WPI so he could attend the meeting. I think after that, the meeting location was amended to include USA.

 - b

Wow....I had forgotten that story, but yes, it is true, I received such an email! :-) This is one of many, many things I learned from my WLUG experiences. Andy -- Andy Stewart (KB1OIQ) Vice President: PART of Westford, MA (WB1GOF) Founder: Chelmsford Linux Meetup Group Founder: Worcester Linux Users' Group

On 1/23/20 12:08 PM, Tim Keller via WLUG wrote:

One of my favorite anecdotes is from one of our installfests at Stratus where Doug Wade tripped over the power cord *just* as the install had finished, but before the MBR/LILO could be written to the disk. It was cool to see a bunch of linux hackers stand around and get Mandrake to properly boot on this persons machine.

Good times.

Tim.

Definitely good times! I remember when Doug Waud tripped on that power cord. At the time, we somewhat affectionately said that the machine had been "Doug'd". I remember a talk that Doug Waud gave about computer networking. His first example of a network was a string with a cup at either end. Does anybody else remember that install fest we held at Stratus Computer? I think we installed Linux on 20 computers that day. I remember using a shoe horn to get it installed on two separate hard drives for Bob Evans, who I still see at ham radio club meetings. Andy -- Andy Stewart (KB1OIQ) Vice President: PART of Westford, MA (WB1GOF) Founder: Chelmsford Linux Meetup Group Founder: Worcester Linux Users' Group

On Fri, Jan 24, 2020 at 08:11:20AM -0500, Andy Stewart wrote:

I remember a talk that Doug Waud gave about computer networking. His first example of a network was a string with a cup at either end.

Over a year ago when this discussion started, I saw Andy's comment above about Doug Waud's home networking talk. I remember the talk fondly, with the slides containing many humorous pictures of tin cans and string. The WLUG website had a link to Doug's slide deck, but it was a broken link to http://www.townisp.com/~dougwaud/homenet.htm. I spent hours looking for a backup of the slides on my systems and on the Wayback Machine (archive.org). I even contacted TownISP's support to see if they had a backup of users' old websites, to no avail. So I gave up and never mentioned it at the time. Well guess what...fast forward to today...I was looking for something unrelated and stumbled upon a backup of my long gone Sun Ultra 10 system that ran Aurora Linux (a rebuild of Red Hat/Fedora), and in there I found a copy of the slide deck! So I updated the WLUG website's Archive section [1] with the slides: Home Networking (March 2001) Presented by Doug Waud. Written by Doug Waud, Chuck Anderson, and Stephen Daukas. You may view the online presentation [2] at your leisure, or you may download the HTML [3] or the download the original StarOffice slide deck [4]. [1] http://www.wlug.org/archives.html [2] http://www.wlug.org/files/homenet/html/networking.html [3] http://www.wlug.org/files/homenet/homenet.tgz [4] http://www.wlug.org/files/homenet/networking.sdd Enjoy!

I read the first dozen+ slides ( real good wording/intro I'd say!) ..then ADD-like, surfed later slides and found a minor gem in slide30 so I'll type it back here if I may, just for fun : (Networking) Addressing and Networks (review exam :) What address/addresses represent a network and which a host (assume a netmask of 255.255.255.0) a) 192.168.1.35 b) 192.168.7.12 c) 192.168.3.0 d) 192.168.0.255 e) 192.168.0.0 ANSWER: ( network: c,e ) ( host: a,b ) d) is neither, it is the broadcast address for network e Notice how it is natural to refer to that network by its addr 192.168.0.0 Incidentally, that term "host". It simply means computer. You run into it alot when you are setting up ip addresses. (end of slide 30). ============== dmildram,static> those were the days. Mask? What Mask? I'm gonna need one, once networked? -Host On Sat, Mar 13, 2021 at 12:16 PM Chuck Anderson via WLUG < wlug@lists.wlug.org> wrote:

On Fri, Jan 24, 2020 at 08:11:20AM -0500, Andy Stewart wrote:

...

I remember a talk that Doug Waud gave about computer networking. His first example of a network was a string with a cup at either end.

Over a year ago when this discussion started, I saw Andy's comment above about Doug Waud's home networking talk. I remember the talk fondly, with the slides containing many humorous pictures of tin cans and string. The WLUG website had a link to Doug's slide deck, but it was a broken link to http://www.townisp.com/~dougwaud/homenet.htm. I spent hours looking for a backup of the slides on my systems and on the Wayback Machine (archive.org). I even contacted TownISP's support to see if they had a backup of users' old websites, to no avail. So I gave up and never mentioned it at the time.

Well guess what...fast forward to today...I was looking for something unrelated and stumbled upon a backup of my long gone Sun Ultra 10 system that ran Aurora Linux (a rebuild of Red Hat/Fedora), and in there I found a copy of the slide deck!

So I updated the WLUG website's Archive section [1] with the slides:

Home Networking (March 2001)

Presented by Doug Waud. Written by Doug Waud, Chuck Anderson, and Stephen Daukas.

You may view the online presentation [2] at your leisure, or you may download the HTML [3] or the download the original StarOffice slide deck [4].

[1] http://www.wlug.org/archives.html [2] http://www.wlug.org/files/homenet/html/networking.html [3] http://www.wlug.org/files/homenet/homenet.tgz [4] http://www.wlug.org/files/homenet/networking.sdd

Enjoy! _______________________________________________ WLUG mailing list -- wlug@lists.wlug.org To unsubscribe send an email to wlug-leave@lists.wlug.org Create Account: https://wlug.mailman3.com/accounts/signup/ Change Settings: https://wlug.mailman3.com/postorius/lists/wlug.lists.wlug.org/ Web Forum/Archive: https://wlug.mailman3.com/hyperkitty/list/wlug@lists.wlug.org/message/EJJT5O...