Allen Schreiber on user groups for the users

I recently ran across a comment about the old days of users' groups for computer enthusiasts. While these groups provided a place for like-minded enthusiasts to gather, you had to find a group that catered to like-minded enthusiasts.

Allen Schreiber, in Stillwater, Oklahoma, had a little difficulty in this regard. In the early 1990s, Schreiber was a passionate Amiga user, but there weren't enough passionate Amiga users in Stillwater to form a user group. In 2014, the stock answer would be to Skype or use Hangouts to gather, but even today, there's a certain satisfaction from being in the same room with enthusiasts.

So Schreiber figured he'd do the next best thing and go to the Stillwater Macintosh Users Group (SMUG). After all, Amigas and Macs are kind of similar, aren't they?

At this point, some people would raise hackles. The Mac fanbois would loudly declare that Amiga users have no place in the blessed Mac realm, and Amiga fanbois would argue that Schreiber shouldn't waste his time with devotees of that primitive Apple computer.

But that's not the reaction that Schreiber received. As a precaution, he figured that he'd check with SMUG's president and make sure it was OK for an Amiga user to attend the meetings. Schreiber:

I will never forget the last sentence in reply that I got that went something like this, “We would welcome you to any of our meetings! It would be interesting to see the similarities and differences between the two systems. Besides that our group is SMUG not SNOB.”