Early Chicago computer club Hi thanks for all your efforts Not sure if you wanted me to answer via your talk page AFAICR made that up As Far As I Can Remember the Chicago computer club I was involved with was C A C H E the Chicago Area Computer Hobbyists Exchange I believe there was a meeting approx Apr 75 begun by Robert Swartz who was lucky enough to be able to affort a Digital Systems original 8080 box and the CP M operating system Digital Systems was right up the road from Gary Kildall the CP M guy so they got together One making a rugged box and the other the OS for it The hobby as I see it really took off with the MITS Altair on the cover of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics Back to Chicago Club SO one day reading Pop tronics I noticed a piece saying there had been a computer club in the Chicago area naming the people who attended and saying when the next one was As I recall it was Lloyd Smith now my best friend formerly of Dyer IN and Bill Burther Valparaiso IN R I P SO we rode together to that possibly 2nd or perhaps 3rd meeting Sept 1975 and I was hooked MY involvement with the club was to be an active participant in that for ex I was sec y for many years wrote programs to maintain the mailing list help with the newsletter often whipping up a small newsletter myself when no one else helped this was one of the events that led to the invention of the BBS I brought my system in to show back when maybe one in 10 actually HAD a system My home system consisted of an Altair 8080 to which I had added a Selectric Typewriter and Dynastor FLYING HEAD disk drive a whopping 256 K yes KAY I had to 1 teach myself digital electronics and 2 design and create the board to interface to these uniquely mine peripherals Ex Type a char on the selectric terminal and watch what came in on an oscilloscope THEN program the altair to produce outputs that matched that timing learning that gasp IBM put the parity bit at the opposite end of the word than most of the rest of the world My machine also once video became available I skipped the TV Typewriter phase a 16 x 64 display called a Processor Technology Video Display Module and no coincidence the BBS Randy Suess and I invented and I programmed had a 16 x 64 size message limit at first THEN my world opened to assembler programming not hand assembling or some other hack when Processor Technology came out with a paper tape distributed editor and 8080 assembler I seem to recall it having 4 things but don t recall now I modified the PT Asm to run on cassette tapes The Tarbell having become a standard and called the combination of things the CACHE Cassette Operating System CCOS and several people in the club started writing assembler programs SO anyway the club had a huge variety of machines represented from the boards Kim 1 Trying to remember if the Apple 1 was a board I think so and the little Sinclair pocket calculator sized ones from TI or with a TI chip When the Radio Shack computers came along many of us pioneers thought this is the end of the hobby What we meant was for example maybe an extreme example I could design and make my own boards AND write the BIOS routines to run them etc and THAT was more the fun so someone buying a built machine seemed kind of sad However this is the march of time and I m sure the Hams amateur radio enthusiasts felt a bit the same way as more and more products came along making it easier and easier to talk over the air I eventually and somewhat delinquently adopted the PC but by then had pretty much burned out programming as a hobby and did not make a LOT of contributions in that area END of my thoughts on the club is this what you were looking for Just to come to a better close the fact I d done my own HW meant incompatability so I invented MODEM ASM named and it stuck Xmodem by Keith Peterson to be able to beep things back and forth with friends Then the BBS came about as ME thinking a dial in system to gather articles for a newsletter but Randy Suess suggested a club project would be by committee so just the two of us him HW and me SW did it independently of the club Preceding unsignedcomment added by talk contribs User tal