Commodore user groups

Commodore user groups were membership associations of people who owned or used Commodore computers, including the Commodore 64 and Commodore 128, and who held meetings, shared technical knowledge and issued newsletters to their members. Some grew into large bodies with chapters, affiliated clubs or regional branches, such as the Toronto PET Users' Group (TPUG) and the British Independent Commodore Products Users Group (ICPUG). In 1985 Commodore Business Machines also ran its own support programme for approved groups, called Commodore World, with a newsletter titled INPUT/OUTPUT.

Working definitions

No contemporary source examined for this article gives a single general definition of the term, so the definitions below are a working synthesis drawn from the groups' own papers and from Commodore's programme rules; they are applied throughout the article.

A user group here means an organised association of owners or users with stated membership, officers or a committee, and regular meetings. Commodore's 1985 guidance for founders, reprinted from earlier magazine articles, listed these structural elements: written by-laws covering the group's name and purpose, a meeting place and schedule, membership rules and dues, and the duties and election of officers. TPUG's masthead set out paid membership categories, and the Central Ohio group's newsletter stated an annual fee and a monthly meeting day.

A club newsletter means a recurring publication that a group produced for its own members and supplied as a benefit of membership. TPUG said that its magazine could be obtained by joining the group, ICPUG said that its newsletter went only to members by subscription, and the Central Ohio group mailed its quarterly to fee-paying members and, on request, to non-members living outside the Columbus area. A periodical edited by a club member is not a club newsletter if the club disowns it: in 1984 TPUG's president stated that The TORPET had no organisational or financial tie to the group. Commercial magazines are covered separately in Commodore 64 and 128 periodicals.

An umbrella organisation means a body whose own records name constituent or associated groups and describe what it did for them. On that basis TPUG, with its chapters and listed associate clubs, and ICPUG, with its regional groups, qualify; Commodore World is treated as a manufacturer's programme for approved groups rather than as a federation that groups formed among themselves.

Bulletin boards and online services are treated as services that groups ran or used, not as groups. A contemporary magazine also kept user groups apart from other kinds of reader notice: the classified order form of Commodore User offered a "User Groups" box next to separate boxes for sales, wants, penpals and miscellaneous items. Demo and cracking groups fall outside these definitions, and none of the records cited here describes such groups.

Commodore World

Purpose and approval

Commodore's support scheme for user groups that it had approved was announced in the first INPUT/OUTPUT. According to the announcement, each approved group would receive the newsletter in several copies and could use an online bulletin board carried on a network covering the whole country. Group officials were to be the channel through which the company passed on technical help and information. The archive record notes that the issue's exact 1985 date is unclear.

The editorial listed what approved groups could expect. Groups were promised advance word of products and company news ahead of any public announcement, and a closed area of the Commodore Information Network reserved for their delegates. The company also promised posters and other material to help recruit members, and possibly products for pre-release testing. In return, Commodore asked groups to answer a survey in each issue. Members were to see the newsletter at their group's meetings, the only place it was made available; no copies were posted to individuals.

Approval depended on a group showing a roster of members of at least a minimum size, named officers, by-laws, and meetings held regularly after formal notice. Each group also had to certify two points in writing: that its members were discouraged from infringing copyright, and that it did not seek profit. Once accepted, a group was sent a package with posters, newsletters, its own identification number and a code that opened the Commodore World pages of the Information Network.

Activity in 1985

The third issue, whose lead news item is datelined July 1985, reported that the applications had been sorted. Commodore planned to announce its first approvals on 26 July at the M.A.R.C.A. convention; the newsletter gave some of the names in advance, a list of clubs spread over many US states. Its colophon described the newsletter as a monthly from Commodore Business Machines, free to approved groups in quantities set by each official roster, and printed figures of "Circulation: 950" and 60,798 user-group members.

The same issue reported results from the programme's first survey. About 3,300 forms had come back, and more than 93 per cent of respondents owned a Commodore 64. It also announced that Quantum Computer Services, working with Commodore, would let user-group members test its new QuantumLink service free of charge before general launch in October. Testers needed a Commodore 64 or 128 with a disk drive, and they were invited to send suggestions and to take part in online discussion forums. The issue's September listing for the service included a Commodore user group forum. The service itself was commercial and is not counted here as a user group; for the software used to reach such services see Commodore 64 and 128 terminal software.

Toronto PET Users' Group

Scope and membership

TPUG called its magazine the official publication of the "world's largest international Commodore users group" in 1984 and repeated the "world's largest" claim in 1985. These are the group's descriptions of itself and were not checked against other groups for this article. The 1985 masthead also called TPUG Inc. a non-profit corporation devoted to supporting anyone who owned or used a Commodore computer, and gave the magazine's frequency as ten issues a year.

Membership came in two broad forms. Regular and full-time student members were described as attending meetings, while associate members paid separate rates for Canada, the United States and overseas, with sea-mail and air-mail options for the last. The president's message in mid-1985 put membership at 15,000 and said that the club had grown to include the magazine, monthly meetings, a conference and a library of more than 5,000 programs. The masthead of the same issue gave 16,000 subscription copies and 10,000 newsstand copies; the April 1986 masthead gave 12,000 and 10,000.

Chapters and associate clubs

In the Toronto area TPUG met in chapters organised by machine, topic or district. The spring 1984 calendar scheduled monthly meetings for PET/CBM, VIC 20, Commodore 64 and SuperPET chapters, a Westside chapter, a communications group and a COMAL group; for a machine-language chapter it gave only a contact, without meeting dates. The calendar also invited members to help start further groups, among them one for new owners. The 1985 contacts page named eleven meeting co-ordinator entries, nine of them labelled as chapters, including Brampton, Eastside and Hardware.

Outside Toronto, TPUG printed a directory of associate clubs. The March 1984 list gave nine clubs in Ontario, Alberta, Michigan and California with their monthly meeting arrangements. By June 1985 the list had more than thirty clubs: groups in five Canadian provinces, groups in many US states, and two international entries, one in West Germany and one in Trinidad. Some of these, such as the Chicago and Houston groups, had several chapters of their own. The issues examined do not state what obligations or rights an associate club had, so the listing shows a network of named clubs but not the terms that bound it.

Independent Commodore Products Users Group

Origins and legal form

ICPUG's own tenth-anniversary history, written by an early member for the September/October 1988 newsletter, says that the group began in 1978 as an independent association for owners of the Commodore PET. Commodore had a club of its own at that time, and at their first meeting, held on 8 October 1978, the founders resolved to stay independent of the company. According to the same account, the first newsletter appeared in November 1978. Within six months, by the history's account, branches had formed in several regions, and members could already use a program library and discounts as well as the newsletter. At its first annual general meeting in August 1979 it had 500 members and adopted a constitution.

The group's second report and accounts records a later change of legal form. On 1 September 1986 the group became a co-operative society, Independent Commodore Products Users Limited, entered on the Friendly Societies register under the 1965 Industrial and Provident Societies Act and still using the ICPUG name; it started trading later that month, and every member owned one share worth £1. The report counts 3,262 shareholding members at the start of 1987 and 2,195 admitted during that year. Among its expenses, the newsletter and postage formed the largest heading, with further costs for exhibitions, library disks, and Prestel and Compunet. The notice of the second annual general meeting, set for May 1988 in London, included fixing the newsletter subscription rate for 1989. Earlier, a June 1983 guide to the Commodore Show had listed ICPUG among the exhibitors.

Regional groups and officers

By 1988 the newsletter named a set of honorary national officials. These included a regional organiser, a discounts officer, an exhibitions organiser, a technical adviser, a disability liaison and the software librarians. The regional organiser's list in that issue covered groups across England and Scotland and in Dublin and West Berlin. It also had groups that were not based on place: one at the Ministry of Defence, one for disabled members and one for users of the Commodore 1520 plotter. The club's own Prestel database had been revised to carry up-to-date information on its branches and new pages on its special interest groups. The same issue shows that ICPUG served several Commodore lines at once. Its chairman described members' households using the C16, Plus/4, Commodore 64, Commodore 128 and Amiga, and the newsletter ran separate library columns for the 64, the 128 and the Plus/4.

Services to members

The services below are documented for particular groups and particular dates; the records do not show that every group offered all of them.

Meetings, help and instruction

Each group record examined mentions regular meetings. TPUG's chapters gathered once a month and its associate clubs published where they met, while in Columbus the Central Ohio group used a community college room every month, on its third Saturday. In January 1984 TPUG's new communications special interest group first met in a room of a public library, and close to twenty people came, according to the magazine's report. Guest speakers explained commercial online services to the group at that meeting and at the next one.

Technical help was also published in print. TPUG's "Help!" column was organised under three headings, for useful hints, for readers' questions awaiting answers, and for members looking for pen pals; its later "Answer Desk" ran as a regular department. A member's article in the Central Ohio newsletter listed the group's meetings among the writer's sources of help, saying that they "usually helped with whatever problem I was having at the time". Commodore's founding advice suggested that groups use their members' skills for lectures, language classes, courses and software demonstrations. For the 1988 Commodore Christmas Show, ICPUG was planning talks that Database Exhibitions had requested, with question-and-answer seminars alongside MIDI music and Amiga art demonstrations; its chairman presented such shows as a chance for members to meet the committee and put problems to experts.

Newsletters, bulletin boards and online access

Groups also ran bulletin boards. In 1984 TPUG's magazine published a new password for the group's board, which operated overnight from Monday to Saturday and all day on Sundays. The Central Ohio masthead advertised a bulletin board service open to the public at all hours, although part of that notice is hard to read in the scan. Commodore World gave delegates of approved groups a private network area, and QuantumLink's free pre-release access was offered to user-group members.

Discounts, events and libraries

Member discounts appear in several records. TPUG's 1986 disk-of-the-month subscription was open only to paid-up members and promised a saving of at least 20 per cent; the order form offered versions for the Commodore 64 and for the Commodore 128 used with a Commodore 1541 drive, among other machines. ICPUG's "Discount Corner" said that Commodore hardware could be bought by members at discount and listed suppliers' reductions for members, and the group offered members discounted tickets to the 1988 Commodore Christmas Show. The 1994 Central Ohio newsletter told members to raise a software publisher's offer of a "user group discount" at one of the group's meetings. TPUG also organised a yearly conference; its 1984 calendar quoted members a fee for registering early.

TPUG and ICPUG each also kept a software library for members, as noted above; how such libraries were distributed is outside the scope of this article.

Independence and directories

Relations with the manufacturer varied. ICPUG's founding history stresses independence from Commodore, and in 1994 the Central Ohio group described itself as informal, non-profit and not connected with Commodore Business Machines. The 1985 Commodore World list of approved groups nevertheless included a Central Ohio Commodore user group in Columbus. The sources examined do not say how long that status lasted.

Commercial magazines kept directories of groups. In August 1986 Compute!'s Gazette ran a "User Group Update" page that relied on readers to send in additions and corrections. Its notes recorded a C64/128 group in Koeln (Cologne), West Germany, that had disbanded and an Alabama club that had changed its name to include the Amiga, before the new listings by US state. ICPUG likewise covered several Commodore lines in 1988, and the Central Ohio newsletter of 1994 carried Amiga and PC-compatible items alongside its Commodore 64 and 128 material. Groups outside North America and Britain, and those publishing in other languages, are mentioned here only in passing.

See also

• Commodore 64 and 128 periodicals
• Commodore 64 and 128 terminal software
• Commodore 64
• Commodore 128
• C64 and C128 manuals as documentary sources
• Demoscene history, heritage and transnational cultural continuity
• Commodore 64 and 128 in education, documented home learning software and the classroom and institutional adoption of the C64 and C128

Automation and sourcing note

This article was independently synthesized from the cited sources under c64.wiki publication policy. Historical manuals and source archives were used as citation-only factual evidence; no source prose, code, images, scans, or screenshots were copied into the candidate.