First move - to Midway

Three months after formation, the cold quarters of the Railway Club were left and the Bug Club moved to the Rowland Memorial Church Hall in James Street Midway meeting every two weeks on Wednesday evenings. Talks, demonstrations and competitions based on the BBC computer continued there for another three years.

Dramatic changes were ahead when Alan Sugar put the Amstrad PC on to the market and sent shock waves through computer industry in the 80's. It was from this period that the evidence of Moore's Law became apparent. (Moore's Law states that every 18 months the capacity and speed of computers doubles.)

With the introduction of this very competitively priced machine, the Amstrad at £750, these computers began to appear in the Bug Club. – a similar specification IBM had a price tag of around £3,000. The Amstrad 1512 (512 Kb of RAM) using MS DOS, a 8086 processor, came with a built in 360 Kb floppy disk drive.

As more and more Amstrad PCs came into the Club it was decided that Beeb Club or Bug Club name was inappropriate and in March 1988 the name was changed to the South Derbyshire Computer User Group. Around this time the membership stood at 38.

A flood of PC compatible software soon became available followed by talks and demonstrations which were the order of the day.   Displays of new programs such as MS Flight Simulator, Desk Top Publishing, Sage (book keeping), Supercalc (spread sheet), Lotus 123 (integrated software), Corel Draw (graphics), Word Star (word processing) and DOS (operating system) were enthusiastically absorbed by SDCUG members.

The improved software lead to the introduction of the Club magazine – Datalog - the first edition appearing in September 1990. NEXT