I have been asked to put together a bit of the computer user group history. A lot has happened over the years but I will concentrate mainly on how the group got started.

Back in 1994 I had a conversation with Dale Wagner and voiced my opinion that I thought we had a need for a computer user group here at the Lake. Some time later that year, my wife and I were having dinner in the Clubhouse Dining Room. Dale and his wife were also having dinner that evening in the Dining Room at a separate table. Coincidentally, Al Colville and his wife, who were new to the Lake, also decided to try out the Dining Room. I don’t recall if the Dining Room was full or what, but for some reason Dale invited Al and Lou to join them at their table. Later in the evening as we were preparing to leave, Dale motioned me over to his table to introduce us to Al and Lou. Apparently during their dinner conversation Dale found out that Al was an ex-IBMer and was active with the Computer Club in Washington D.C. We chatted for a few minutes and Al said that if I wanted to start a computer club here that he would be glad to help. That conversation is what started the ball rolling.

I figured that the next step should be to find out if there was sufficient interest in computers here at the Lake to invest the time and effort to pull something together. I placed a notice in the Friday Flyer asking that anyone interested in forming a computer user group to meet with me in the Terrace Room. As I recall we had twenty people or so come to the December 1994 meeting. We had a lengthy discussion pointing out that technical help was getting more and more costly and difficult to obtain. Manufacturers were starting not to include manuals, telephone hold times for technicians were getting more lengthly, toll free numbers were changing to toll numbers etc. It was felt that by forming a group we could help each other when problems arose. We decided to move ahead with forming a user group. We also decided to prepare a listing that showed the type of computer and the software that being run by each member. The idea here was to distribute the data so if you were having a problem with a program you could go down the list and see who else was using that particular software and call them to discuss the problem. In order to show the attendees some other uses of their computer, I asked Bob Floyd who lived here at the Lake to speak to us on the use of Bulletin Boards. He ran one from his home and agreed to give members a free trial period and a reduced rate if they decided to join. We agreed to meet again in January.

At the January meeting we had 28 people in attendance and we took care of a lot of the administrative chores such as setting up a regular time and date for meetings and determining how the meetings would be run. We gave a lot of thought to our By-Laws and made that a high priority item.

During the February meeting we elected officers (I was elected to serve as President, Wayne Carney was VP, Al Colville was the Secretary, Don Raab was Treasurer, and Nancy Gross was the Program Chairman). We also started to assign projects to individuals, such as getting the ball rolling on a Newsletter. The committee to get one started consisted of: Shirley Devault, Don Raab and Stephanie Halfacre. Wayne Carney chaired a group consisting of Tim O’Donnell, Bob Anderson, Marlin Meese, Dale Wagner, and Lorna Jervis to conduct a phone survey to determine what people wanted to get out of a computer group.

Our lack of experience with computer clubs meant that we had to do a lot checking with other existing clubs. We found that Charlottesville had a group for some time but they were not very active – attendance at their meeting numbered perhaps a dozen or so at best. The Senior Center in Charlottesville also had a computer group but it was even less active than the regular Charlottesville group. Richmond, on the other hand, had a very active group numbering 7 to 800.

We decided to use a portion of the meeting times to break up into four separate help groups to allow more attendees to ask questions and receive help with specific concerns. Each group (On-line/BBs, Word Processing/spreadsheets/data bases & Genealogy) had a more experienced leader.

As the year progressed more and more people started to join our group. Most of the members had very little computer experience so most of the weight fell on those who were a bit more comfortable with computers. We tried very hard to get people to use the bulletin boards but we were not too successful. Bob Floyd agreed to set one up just for our group if we could generate sufficient interest. This required installing special software, and logging in to various bulletin boards each of which had different software. It was like a maze to maneuver among the various features offered such as newsgroups and local discussion groups. Even the more experienced members of our group had some difficulty figuring out the interworkings. They also offered download service for programs – some were free and some were not. One BBS service in Charlottesville offered completely free downloads and had quite a variety of programs. Al Colville and I took it upon ourselves to make house calls to anyone wanting to wanted to participate in the BBS’s. We would install the programs, and show them how to use them – very few people took advantage of the offer.

As the Internet came into being the cumbersome BBS’s fell by the wayside as everyone switched to the internet. As we moved into the Internet, email became the big use. Again Al and I would make house calls to get people set up with email and showed them how to use the programs. We found that most of the older people were very reluctant to buy a computer, and those that did were so afraid of messing it up that they received very little benefit from having a computer. Our club made a concerted effort to try and convenience everyone to give it try but it was a very hard sell. It was not until email became more popular with the younger group and they wanted to communicate with their parents that the older group started to move in that direction.

We covered a lot of ground that first year. Monticello Avenue Virtual Village came into being and we volunteered to cover their operation each Tuesday. Our volunteers agreed to work in two hours shifts to help people who wanted to use their computers mainly to access the Internet. As we helped the others we also gained experience.

The Newsletter group completed their study and thought that a Newsletter would be appropriate and feasible. Stephanie Halfacre was tasked with the leadership role to pull it together. They had to start from scratch but did an outstanding job. They contacted other computer user groups that had newsletters and asked to be placed on their distribution list. We found that we could use their articles as long as we gave credit to the originator, so the newsletter group and the new officers would cull through the newsletters and tried to pick out articles that we thought might be interest to our group. This was a chore so we decided to only do a quarterly newsletter instead of a monthly one which many of the other computer groups had. Our first issue was in June 95. Next we thought that a library of computer books would be nice so our membership brought in books that could be loaned out to others. Our library was located in the back of this room. This turned out to be our biggest mistake – virtually all of the books were taken and not returned.

Another thing that we started was putting together a help list. It was broken down into 14 different categories. We researched and put together a listing of the computer service companies in both Fluvanna and Charlottesville and listed the companies with the rates that they charged. We set up a couple of Special Interest Groups or SIGS. The first one was Genealogy – Bettie O’Donnell got that one going. That was followed by the On-Line SIG. We felt that these areas could not be given the attention that they deserved during our regular meetings.

We had a special presentation during each meeting on some subject, starting with our second meeting of the year, which was February. These topics included Ergonomics, Computer Viruses, the Internet, Troubleshooting, Financial Software, Freeware and Shareware, Word processing, and Windows.

By the end of the first year our membership rolls swelled to about 50 people, and now in recent time we are over 100. I believe we accomplished a lot during that first year and set the stage for numerous improvement that were implemented with each new group of officers. We had a great group of dedicated, hard working people who devoted a lot of man-hours to bring this all together. A user group like this is only as good as the willingness of its members to participate and volunteer some of their time to make it better. It was my personal feeling at the time, that we should have new leadership each year to bring forth new ideas and innovations. That has worked fine over the years with many improvements to the program.

The club presidents to date were in this order:

• Kirt Doersch
• Al Colville
• Dick VanNierop
• Scott Harless
• Leslie Yowell
• Pat Passalacqua

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