[buug] BUUG (partial) history - blast from the past! ... and ... future!

[Claude Jager-Rubinson]

On 1/15/22 03:29, Michael Paoli wrote:
> BUUG (partial) history - blast from the past! ... and ... future!

Thanks for this walk down memory lane!  I only lived in Berkeley for 
three years, but BUUG was a huge part of my life there and I continue to 
have incredibly fond memories of our meetings and the friends I made 
(and have largely lost touch with over the years). I left Berkeley for 
grad school in 2003, just before you showed up and can confirm your history.

Indeed, we were at weak.org/buug for years until somebody (maybe Aaron 
Porter?) purchased the buug.org domain.  Just one or two people had 
@buug.org email addresses, which was obviously very prestigious.  
Attendance at Au Coquelet was usually half-a-dozen people but would 
occasionally shoot up because it during the dot-com bust and people 
would come looking for jobs and to network.  Once they realized that we 
couldn't help them, they didn't come back.

BUUG was super fun and I learned a ton that in many ways remains the 
foundation of my Unix knowledge and programming, more generally.  The 
ThinkPad that I'm typing this email on is certainly much faster and 
fancier than the one I was using back then.  But it's still running FVWM 
with a config file that's not fundamentally different from the one that 
I was working on back then, just with a lot of additional functionality 
that's accumulated over the years.

Upon moving to Tucson for grad school, I missed BUUG and while there 
were technical meetings, there wasn't any social meetings. So I started 
hosting a twice-monthly social hour at a local coffee shop as part of 
the Tucson Free Unix Group (TFUG).  At some point, the coffee hour 
transmuted into a happy hour that was especially well attended.  At some 
point after I moved to Houston in 2010, the TFUG happy hour dissolved, 
like so many other LUGs have.

More recently, I've taken over organizing the Houston Functional 
Programming User Group (HFPUG), although we too have of course been 
meeting virtually since the pandemic.  Before the pandemic, however, one 
of my main goals was to cultivate a social hour, following in the 
footsteps of BUUG and TFUG.  If it ever again becomes safe to eat inside 
a restaurant, I'll keep trying.  And indeed, yes, it was also through 
BUUG that I was first introduced to functional programming.

I'm always glad when an email shows up from the BUUG mailing list and am 
very happy that you all have kept the group going for all these years.

Claude