BMUG

The Berkeley Macintosh Users Group, or more commonly "BMUG", was the largest Macintosh User Group. It was founded in September 1984 by a group of UC Berkeley students including Reese Jones Professor Dr. David L. Foster, Raines Cohen and William (Bill) Gandy (principal supplier of the massive shareware software library) which really got the group off the ground. This group of individuals became the focal-point for the nascent Apple Macintosh user community. With more than 13,000 members, or "BMUGgers" at its peak in 1993, the group was the largest, and generally understood to be the most important, Macintosh users group. A few of the notable members include John "Captain Crunch" Draper, the Sultan of Brunei Hassanal Bolkiah, notorious murderer Enrique Zambrano, early hacker-chaser Cliff Stoll, Inktomi founder Eric Brewer, and may prominent computing journalists like John Dvorak, Ilene Hoffman, Leo Laporte and Adam Engst. An example of the group's omnipresent blue-floppy-disk lapel pin is held in the Smithsonian Institution's American History collection. BMUG's history and activities were closely linked with the MacWorld Expo meetings, traditionally held in San Francisco each January and Boston each August.

Organization

Day-to-day management of the organization was balanced between the senior full-time staff: business manager Harry Critchfield, technical manager Steve Costa, and support manager Randy Simon.

Business

BMUG's finances and business operations were managed by Harry Critchfield and Alisa Schulman, better known for her role as a DJ at KALX. In 1995 Anne Wrixon replaced Harry Critchfield, and in 1997, Wrixon was replaced by Hal Gibson, who remained until the end.

Technical

One of BMUG's principal operations was collaborative Macintosh repair and maintenance. A benefit of BMUG membership was hardware repair (and often recovery of lost documents from floppy and hard disks). The technical operations were managed by Steve Costa. Electrical engineer Chuck Meyer conducted many of the trickier repairs. Herb Dang was a fixture in BMUG's technical services, and his son Frank continued that tradition into a second generation.

Support

BMUG maintained a Macintosh support call-center, which helped users around the world by answering questions and helping them resolve technical problems with their computers. The support operation was managed by Randy Simon, and staffed by volunteers. While much of the support operation dealt with assisting users whose computers had crashed, a significant portion of it dealt with the specific "vertical market" of desktop publishing and prepress issues, which was then in its infancy and was one of the Macintosh's primary markets. Randy Simon also coordinated the production and publications of BMUG's massive biannual newsletters, sometimes totaling more than a thousand pages per year, initially with the assistance of BMUG volunteers Carolyn Sagami, Zig Zichterman, Robert Lettieri and Bill Woodcock, and later Hans Hansen. A collaboration between BMUG members, Programming SIG chair Greg Dow (now at Adobe) and networking and prepress expert Bill Woodcock (now at Packet Clearing House) resulted in the first example of " database publishing," a 1989 encyclopedia of Macintosh software, for which plates were produced directly from a FileMaker database without intervening processing.

Offices

BMUG was initially located in suite 3B, 2150 Kittredge Street, in downtown Berkeley, directly adjoining the southwest corner of the UC Berkeley campus. This building also housed Farallon Computing until Farallon outgrew the space and moved five blocks south-east to Dwight Way. After six years, BMUG moved to a larger space with street frontage at 2055 Center Street, a block and a half west of campus and directly across from the downtown Berkeley BART station.

Projects

Shareware disk duplication

BMUG's primary revenue-generating activity was the sneakernet distribution of Macintosh shareware software from its comprehensive library on 400k and 800k 3.5" floppy disks. BMUG's shareware disk duplication and distribution program was run by Art Lau and Gerald Raddatz, supplemented by the efforts of many of the other volunteers.

Initially, William (Bill) Gandy was approached by Dr. David L. Foster, a Professor at UC. Berkeley, who asked Bill Gandy to donate his incredibly huge library of Freeware and Shareware software for the Macintosh. Bill had obtained the software while still a teen, working at the Computer Store of Oakland.

Bill had been approached by an Apple fellow, by the name of Phil White, who saw that Bill was a phenomenal sales person for the Computer Store of Oakland. Phil White felt that it would be an opportune method of getting the Macintosh software into the hands of someone who could "spread the word", about all of the cool software that was in Beta and was right around the corner.

Bill turned around and in the true sense of philanthropy donated to Dr. Foster an incredibly large volume of Beta software, which became one of the primary ways in which BMUG started to make money by selling the disks to students, faculty and any other member or visitor to BMUG. This of course attracted an incredible amount of attention to BMUG as the Macintosh barely had 3 actual pieces of software that were being sold. Literally there was only MacWrite, MacPaint and Multiplan (the forerunner to Excel).

BMUG's memberships began to swell exponentially as the word spread across campus and eventually around the world, that BMUG was the place to get Macintosh software, when no one else had "Diddley-Squat" in terms of software offerings. This attracted so much attention, that the initial halls and auditoriums were insufficient to hold the now burgeoning ranks of BMUGgers as they literally had to find new lecture halls and auditoriums after every meeting, until they could only be held in Sproul Hall, one of the largest auditoriums on the Berkeley Campus. Funny how a little thing like software could turn into such a prolific collection of Software Distribution.

But that wasn't all, because as word spread, then Macintosh Software makers and Hardware manufacturers began visiting and showing off their products and some extremely crazy dynamics began to take shape. For instance, BMUG began to accumulate various Macintosh Hardware, because when manufacturers would show off their Hardware products, they had a habit of "leaving" the Hardware at the BMUG presentations. Soon BMUG began to collect a massive amount of storage devices, printers and other devices, which added fuel to the frenzy of the BMUG community's fervor. In essence it spread like wildfire, as more and more companies began vying for the opportunity to show off their wares to spurn sales. In a symbiotic sense, BMUG became richer for it, as they could boast of having a serious amount of Hardware and Software when other outlets were paltry in comparison. Not to mention the incredible amount raw "Brainware" that was parlayed in the form of numerous famous and infamous guest speakers, which appeared and lectured at BMUG meetings.

Eventually this finally turned into the Hardware and Software vendor phenomenon that would become MacWorld.

BMUGnet/PhoneNET

One of the early successes for the group was BMUGNet, a variant of Apple's LocalTalk system which used standard telephone wires to connect Macintosh computers together in a local area network. Wiring plans were initially published in the Fall 1985 BMUG Newsletter, but members could purchase adapters assembled by the group. Co-founder Reese Jones branched the production off as the commercial business Farallon Computing in 1986, renaming the product PhoneNet. The group invented other subsequent low-cost hardware kits as well... the 1991 introduction of the low-cost Mac LC prompted BMUG to begin offering a $12 VGA monitor adapter. MacRecorder, the first audio input device for the Macintosh, was also first released in 1985 as a BMUG kit, before being productized by Farallon and then Macromedia.

Weekly meetings

BMUG was famous for lively meetings, "We are in the business of giving away information" motto, "BMUG Awards", its great MacWorld Expo get-togethers, CD and book publishing, 400+ page biannual "newsletters" akin to the Whole Earth Catalog, and one of the largest shareware collections for Macintosh Public domain software sold to members and customers on floppy disks. These meetings are often cited by tech notables as their introduction to technology.

BMUG hosted an enthusiastic weekly Thursday night meeting with questions and answers, and software demonstrations by vendors, followed at the end by a raffle. Notable speakers included: Steve Jobs, Guy Kawasaki, Ted Nelson, Heidi Roizen, Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson, Jean-Louis Gassée, Marc Benioff, Melinda Ann French (Gates) and Bill Gates.

Special Interest Groups

It also held Special Interest Groups (SIGs) on Basic Mac, Troubleshooting, ClarisWorks (integrated word processing, drawing, painting, spreadsheet, database and telecommunications), FileMakerPro relational databases, graphics, video, music, the Internet, programming and mathematics. Branch groups held general meetings in outlying areas, including San Francisco, Cupertino and Tokyo.

Biannual Newsletter

Rather than publish a standard monthly newsletter, the group decided to publish a collection of articles in a bound book every six months. The resulting "newsletter" routinely exceeded 300 pages in length. The newsletter was originally edited by volunteers Carolyn Sagami and Zig Zichterman, until Randy Simon was hired as staff, and then turned over to Hans Hansen when Randy departed.

Bulletin Board System

BMUG's Bulletin board system or "BBS" was managed by Bernard Aboba (then in graduate school at Stanford and UC Berkeley, subsequently at Microsoft) with the assistance of Bill Woodcock. It was an early FidoNet node, and from 1986 through 1993, the home of the FidoNet MacNetAdmin "echo," which spawned the AppleTalk Network Managers Association (which in turn begat the AppleTalk Networking Forum), the inaptly-named A/UX Users Group, and numerous other real-world periodic meet-ups. The BMUG BBS also served as a nexus for the interoperability testing of email gateways between FidoNet, UUCP, SMTP, and a number of proprietary AppleTalk, NetWare, and Internet Protocol electronic mail systems, including CE Software's QuickMail, SoftArc's FirstClass, those from Information Electronics and AppleLink Personal Edition, which went on to become America Online. When the BBS host system in Berkeley was damaged by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, Aboba set up a temporary stand-in using a solid-state industrial PLC and multi-line serial controller, which was able to keep up with the heavy call volume by answering, presenting an ASCII banner explaining the situation, and immediately disconnecting. The BBS eventually ran on hardware in Berkeley, Palo Alto, Boston, and Tokyo.

Books

In addition to the newsletter, BMUG published the occasional reference book. These included:
* ''The BMUG Guide to Bulletin Boards and Beyond'', by Bernard Aboba, 1992 - A guide to setup and management of dial-up BBSs.
* ''Zen and the Art of Resource Editing'', by Derrick Schneider, 1990-1995 - A guide to using Apple's ResEdit tool to modify Macintosh software.
* ''The Tao of AppleScript'', by Derrick Schneider, 1993 and 1994 - A guide to scripting and automation under MacOS System 7.

Controversy

Rivalry with the Boston Computer Society

BMUG was certainly the largest Macintosh users group, but the Boston Computer Society was the largest computer users group. BCS-Mac, the Macintosh special interest group of the Boston Computer Society, was the second largest Macintosh users group. A good-humored rivalry obtained between the two groups throughout their mutual existence, but they were ultimately supportive of each other. BMUG's first foray onto BCS-Mac's Boston home turf, at MacWorld Expo on August 11–13 of 1987 was commemorated with a new T-shirt, featuring an inscription "BMUG in Boston" which Bill Woodcock, who designed BMUG's T-shirts, intended to look like graffiti, using a rattle-can to write the original text in black paint on white paper, which was then photographed, scanned, and converted to PostScript in Adobe illustrator, before being silkscreened in red on black shirts. The red-on-black effect, however, was said by startled BCS-Mac members to more resemble dripping blood than spray-paint.

1995-1997 Budget Crisis

By 1995, BMUG had accumulated a debt of $250,000, which forced a two-year period of restructuring and the layoff of some of the staff, but which was weathered successfully.

Closure and Legacy

With the increasing cost of printing the biannual newsletter, decreasing membership and the waning sales of software due to the rise of the Internet, revenues could not keep up and the not-for-profit corporation declared bankruptcy in 2000. However, its members continued to collaborate and meet as separate entities in the following years.

* the San Francisco branch continued as BMUGWest until their closure in March 2016.
* the South Bay branch continues as Silicon Valley MUG, still active in 2024.
* Members purchased the group's online presence (the BMUG BBS) and kept it running as PlanetMUG, in conjunction with The BostonBBS (formerly the Boston Computer Society's Mac BBS), until PlanetMUG shut down in early 2023. Archived 2023-09-01.

See also

* :Berkeley Macintosh Users Group members

References

External links

Virtual Harbor
the successor group to the BMUG BBS / PlanetMUG and its partners

Silicon Valley Macintosh User Group
the south-bay outgrowth of BMUG, which continues to this day

Bellarine Mac User Group
unrelated but with the same acronym and purpose, currently operating in Geelong, Australia

''LaserWriter II: A Novel''
documenting the contemporaneous and similar community around Tekserve, a similar Macintosh User Group in New York

{{Authority control

Apple Inc. user groups
Culture of Berkeley, California
1984 establishments in California
2000 disestablishments in California