South Derbyshire Computer User Group History

Early Days

In March 1984 Trevor Hutchinson of Linton had the foresight to start a club for those interested in the relatively new hobby of computing. This became known as the Beeb Users' Group, or Bug Club for short. The computer used by most of the first members of the Club and the one that was promoted by the education authorities was the Acorn BBC, hence the name of the Club.   In those days computers were not as ubiquitous as they are now, hobbyists or large companies with mainframes being the main owners. The thirst for knowledge about this new pastime resulted in 30 enthusiasts joining the Club, who met at the Model Railway Club premises on Church Gresley Common.

Whilst the majority of computers in the Club were BBCs other makes such as the Electron (the earlier version of the BBC), Amiga, Commodore 64 and Spectrum were occasionally to be seen at the meetings. The BBC machines boasted a RAM of 32 kilobytes and initially used tape recorders as a method of storing programs and data. It was some time before the luxury of a disk drive became available.   Portable television sets were commonly used as monitors.

In the beginning there was little software about. Word processors and spread sheets came on 16 Kb ROM chips and many programs were copied out, line by line, from the current computer magazines. The typing of programs proved to be an excellent method of learning how to write and de-bug programs, which together with learning how to use programs, was one of the aims of the Club. NEXT