Number 195 - August 1999

On User Groups
By Stephen Manes, PC Magazine March 27,1990
Of course I knew better. Rule 2 of the Computer Survival handbook clearly warns never to try anything new with hardware or software when the relevant technical support office is closed. But I was under the influence of Catch 2 of the same handbook, which points out that the only time you ever need or want to try something new is on evenings and weekends--when the relevant technical support office is closed.     So instead of enlisting the support of the manual in my desperate hunt for an arcane word-processing trick buried 18 levels deep in the context-insensitive help system, I placed a long-distance emergency call to my friend Fontmeister. In about 15 seconds I had the answer.     The only drawback was that while applying Fontmeister's trick to my recalcitrant document, I had to listen to his interminable tale of woe. A brand-new power supply of typically indeterminate origin had somehow fried the innards of his Disintegrator, the killer machine he had personally assembled from parts, no two of which had heretofore been seen on the same continent. It was somewhere during this recitation that I realized we constituted a de facto user group.     User groups have a fond place in my heart. Seven years ago [that was 1983 folks] in New York, I joined one for three main reasons: I wanted to make my printer respond to WordStar's special-effect commands, I needed to figure out how to use random files in BASIC, and I'd recently gotten divorced.     The user group didn't help much with Reason 3; at the time, the membership was almost exclusively male. But among the two dozen participants at the first meeting I attended was one fellow who knew everything there was to know about boldfacing and superscripting in WordStar, and another who set me straight about BASIC's peccadilloes. I was hooked--in a town where computer dealers rarely bother to return phone calls, where else could you find such a bottomless fount of wisdom to depend on?     The user group was where I bought my first RAM and I/O card and my first keyboard macro software. Its newsletter published the first article I ever wrote about computers--an arcane but essential batch file trick that a board manufacturer's tech support department hadn't managed to figure out. The group introduced me to everyone from ego-crazed consultants to industry stars to other beginners--many of whom have since gone on to fame and fortune in the computer trade. The Joy of Helping     In the intervening years, individual user groups have experienced the ups and downs, political upheavals, and not-so-subtle purges common in volunteer organizations, where power is among the few rewards beyond the joy of helping others. But though the user group movement overall has continued to grow, its leaders often complain that they're increasingly taken for granted. It's not hard to see why. In the distant past, this magazine [see title credits above] and others published a monthly listing of all the local user groups. When this eventually became unwieldy, the magazines simply dropped it--even as the groups were growing bigger and more sophisticated.     And today's industry seems to have a schizoid relationship with user groups. Vendors still court the groups, whose members can be so powerful in spreading the word about new products. But the same vendors have been known to gripe about the groups,	either as supposed hotbeds of quantity-one nerds who don't influence corporate buying, as dens of misers on the lookout for freebies and discounts, or (more accurately) as cells of freethinkers who actually have the gall to publicly air the vendor's dirtiest laundry and to complain vociferously about their sleaziest policies.     So it's little wonder the user group movement sometimes feels left out and unloved. But it's also clear that user groups still wield enormous power as the conscience of the industry. The opinions expressed in user-group circles tend to be arrogant, imperious, opinionated and, more often than not, accurate. You'll rarely hear members hedging, either in person or in print, about what they think.     User-group pressure was a major factor in the virtual abandonment of copy-protection among software vendors [mainly Lotus]. User-group libraries made shareware possible. And user-group meetings and newsletters continue to serve up early-warning radar alerts about flea-bitten dogs of the computer business, from bug-ridden programs to incompetent dealers.     The educational role of user groups today can hardly be overestimated. Graphical user interfaces can't hide the fact that computers are becoming more complex, not easier to use but harder [when things go wrong]. Of all the resources in the computer business, there remains one more useful than any microprocessor, language, or other ware hard or soft. I refer, of course, to that rarest of beasts: The One Who Knows.     Friend or acquaintance, colleague or sales rep, The One Who Knows is often the only defense against the dark clouds of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Big companies can and do pay handsome sums to such experts, but smaller fry (including governments) often can't or won't. The user groups makes Ones Who Know available by the dozens--for free.     How many times does a computer suddenly appear on the desk of a computer virgin, with no help whatsoever beyond what the manual provides? How many times does the documentation run out when you attempt to use some "advanced" feature of your software? Somebody "out there" undoubtedly knows the answer, and usually a single visit to a user group will find that somebody.     These triumphs of voluntarism and unpaid consultancy have probably defused more frustration than any other single source. User groups members go so far as to publish their phone numbers [and e-mail addresses] in the newsletters, encouraging others to call in when baffled, confounded, or stuck. This sort of altruism extends throughout the workings of a group--from the laborious task of putting out a monthly newsletter to the delicate diplomacy of cajoling an industry star into showing up after a local expert has justly trashed his latest product.     A few members, particularly free-lance consultants, do gain a payoff simply from visibility; the group becomes an arena in which to flaunt their considerable skills. For most, though, the work is its own reward; it's a nice feeling to be a locally recognized expert, even if on something like the late unlamented Otrona Attache. [An early laptop -rjt]     One of which, years ago, had been cannibalized for a capacitor or something by my friend Fontmeister--who wound up his story with, "See you later. You don't know anything about power supplies, and I just remembered this guy in my user group ..."
Number 195 - August 1999