[kwlug-disc] 40 years ago?

[Charles M]

We had a Commodore 64. In October 1983 I joined my first computer user
group, BUG, the Barrie User's Group. The meeting I went to was held in
a big gymnasium where a number of members displayed their gear at
booths (much like a trade show), while one person gave a presentation
on stage. The club had a disk-of-the-month (5 1/4" floppies) which was
a big draw. For $2.00 you could get a bunch of software developed by
members of BUG and TPUG. If I remember correctly our disk librarian at
the time was Dave Hook. Recently I've actually connected back with the
group (COVID-19 meant meetings moved online). The presentations were
very cool with people displaying things from home-made light pens in a
marker casing to various exotic dot-matrix printers.

I worked at a flea market in 1987 for a couple who ran Simcoe Computer
Consulting. They sold PCs, but I mostly sold software at the market
(but started one conversation that ended up with a school board in
Toronto buying several PCs from them). I'm pretty sure this is where
my first PC (in 89) came from. It had a 10MHz NEC V20 chip, 1MB RAM,
and a 42MB hard drive.

I remember thinking that PCs would never replace our C64. I did a
little assembler back in the day and remember thinking "How the heck
do you address devices in assembler on the PC when the hardware
differs so much? How do you know what address to load something into
when one video card might be very different from the next."