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SHARE and the First User Groups

Abstract

In August 1955 representatives of seventeen organizations that had ordered IBM’s new 704 met at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica and agreed to stop writing the same programs seventeen times. Their group, SHARE, is the oldest computer user group still active. Its members swapped source code through a common library, wrote an operating system for the IBM 709 in 1959, and sat with IBM on the committee that designed PL/I. DEC’s customers copied the model in 1961 with DECUS, whose tapes spread Adventure and Star Trek. In 1977 a thirteen-year-old in Boston started the Boston Computer Society, which grew into the largest personal-computer club in the world before the internet made it unnecessary.

Seventeen Installations

The first IBM scientific computers came with almost no software. Every customer of the IBM 701, many of them aerospace companies in the Los Angeles area, wrote its own assembler, its own floating-point routines and its own utilities, and the coming 704 would have meant writing them all again. After an IBM symposium in Los Angeles in August 1955, representatives of seventeen organizations that had ordered the 704 met at RAND in Santa Monica to divide the work instead. Accounts give the day as 15 or 22 August. Among the organizers were Paul Armer, who ran RAND’s computer department, and Frank Wagner of North American Aviation.

They called the group SHARE. The organization later explained that the name “is not an acronym; it’s what we do.” By the end of 1955 it represented 22 installations and had written membership requirements and operating procedures, and members were expected to accept one another’s competence instead of rewriting each other’s code.

The Library and the Operating System

SHARE’s central asset was its library. IBM shipped its own programs as source code, systems programmers modified them for their installations, and the modifications and members’ own programs went back into the common pool, from which anyone in SHARE could take them. Members also took on larger projects. Charles Bachman of Dow Chemical was a founding member of SHARE’s Data Processing Committee, which sponsored 9PAC, a report generator for the 709 released in 1959. West Coast members built programs to run jobs one after another and allocate the machine’s devices, extending General Motors’ GM-NAA I/O for the 704, and in 1959 the result appeared as the SHARE Operating System (SOS) for the IBM 709, later the 7090. IBM dropped it in 1962 for its own IBSYS, which was incompatible.

The group also pushed IBM’s designs. Its members’ experience with FORTRAN and with floating-point errors on the 704 fed the discussions that produced hardware interrupts. In 1963 SHARE and IBM formed an Advanced Language Development Committee whose “3x3” group designed the language that became PL/I. When the System/360 arrived, SHARE’s members moved to it together, and the group outlived every machine it was founded for. In 2005 it had about 20,000 members from some 2,300 IBM customers. Its business-computing counterpart, GUIDE, ceased operating in September 1999, and SHARE took over much of its work.

DECUS

Digital Equipment Corporation’s first computer, the PDP-1, had the same problem on a smaller scale, and in March 1961 its users formed the Digital Equipment Computer Users Society (DECUS), founded by Edward Fredkin, who was then at BBN. DECUS was legally part of DEC and subsidized by it, but run by volunteers. Its software library collected programs submitted by members, sorted by processor and operating system, listed them in yearly catalogs and copied them onto tape by hand for a fee. Much of the early culture of computer games travelled this way: Adventure, Hunt the Wumpus and Star Trek reached many of their first players through DECUS, and Zork and Empire were popularized there (see Colossal Cave, Zork, and Interactive Fiction).

DEC’s own history credited DECUS with about 100,000 members in 23 chapters at its height. The society followed its company through every takeover: it became a Compaq user group in 1998, its US chapter incorporated independently as Encompass in 2000, it became part of HP’s user society after HP bought Compaq in 2002, and in 2008 Encompass merged with two other HP user groups into Connect.

The Boston Computer Society

User groups for personal computers began with the hobbyists. The Homebrew Computer Club first met in a Menlo Park garage on 5 March 1975. In Boston, Jonathan Rotenberg, thirteen years old, and another enthusiast held the first meeting of the Boston Computer Society on 12 February 1977, around a table in the library of the Commonwealth School; four people came. “Officially, the BCS started in my bedroom,” Rotenberg told the Christian Science Monitor in 1982, when the society had about 3,500 members, a downtown office with Saturday clinics, a resource library, an annual forum on the future of personal computers and a magazine, Boston Computer Update, with a circulation of 10,000. Rotenberg was its president until 1990, when he became chairman.

Manufacturers came to the BCS to reach users. Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston introduced VisiCalc at a BCS meeting in 1979; Apple gave the Macintosh its East Coast introduction there in 1984; NeXT presented its computer to almost 3,000 people at Symphony Hall in 1988. Membership passed 30,000 in 1988 and peaked at 31,100 in June 1989, with more than 75 user and special-interest groups holding over 150 meetings a month. Then users needed less help, and the internet offered it for free. Membership fell to 18,000, the money ran out, and the board closed the society in October 1996.

The Model

The first user groups did for their members what manufacturers did not yet do: they supplied software, documentation and support, and they told vendors what to build. The arrangement depended on source code being shared, and it lasted at IBM until the company began pricing software separately from hardware in 1969 (see Shareware and Public Domain). SHARE still holds two large meetings a year.

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