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The Digital Equipment Computer Users' Society (DECUS) was an independent
computer user group A users' group (also user's group or user group) is a type of club focused on the use of a particular technology, usually (but not always) computer-related. Overview Users' groups started in the early days of mainframe computers, as a way to sh ...
related to
Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president unt ...
(DEC). The Connect User Group Community, formed from the consolidation in May, 2008 of DECUS, Encompass, HP-Interex, and ITUG is the
Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. HP developed and provided a wide variety of hardware components ...
’s largest user community, representing more than 50,000 participants.


History

DECUS was the Digital Equipment Computer Users' Society, a
users' group A users' group (also user's group or user group) is a type of club focused on the use of a particular technology, usually (but not always) computer-related. Overview Users' groups started in the early days of mainframe computers, as a way to sh ...
for
Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president unt ...
(DEC) computers. Members included companies and organizations who purchased DEC equipment; many members were application programmers who wrote code for DEC machines or system programmers who managed DEC systems. DECUS was founded in March 1961 by
Edward Fredkin Edward Fredkin (born October 2, 1934) is a distinguished career professor at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), and an early pioneer of digital physics. Fredkin's primary contributions include work on reversible computing and cellular automata. ...
. DECUS was legally a part of Digital Equipment Corporation and subsidized by the company; however, it was run by unpaid volunteers. Digital staff members were not eligible to join DECUS, yet were allowed and encouraged to participate in DECUS activities. Digital, in turn, relied on DECUS as an important channel of communication with its customers.


DECUS Software Library

DECUS had a software library which accepted orders from anyone, distributing programs submitted to it by people willing to share. It was organized by processor and operating system, using information submitted by program submitters, who signed releases allowing this and asserting their right to do so. The DECUS library published catalogs of these offerings yearly, though because it had the catalog mastered by an outside firm, it did not have easy ways to retrieve the content of early catalogs (prior to circa 1980) in machine readable format. Later material was maintained in house and was more easily edited. The charges for copying were somewhat high, reflecting the fact the copies were made by hand on DECUS equipment.


Activities

There were two DECUS US symposia per year, at which members and DEC employees gave presentations, and could visit an exhibit hall containing many new computer models and peripherals among other things. By grace of the DEC employees, it became a custom to allow users to copy media for one another on these machines. This activity grew with time, and in the spring of 1977 some volunteers from the RSX SIG (Special Interest Group) led by Phil Cannon, Jim Neeland, and several others, arranged an informal drop-off, and made master distributions of all material submitted. Then they and other volunteers essentially made copies of this master distribution on tapes for the rest of the symposium, for anyone with a blank tape to write on. This very quickly grew, and was noted in LUG (local user group) and SIG (special interest group) newsletters. The process of creating a master quickly attracted other volunteers who would make a master index of whatever had been submitted. The process of physically creating master tapes remained much the same until around 1979, when the tapecopy coordinators arranged copying facilities somewhere near the symposium site, because 9-track tape drives were not appearing as much on the exhibit hall floor often enough to be relied on. By fall 1979, there was a release form used with submissions, so that the DECUS library could redistribute the combined tapes, making them more easily available to members who did not get to the symposia. The VAX/VMS SIG started producing SIG tapes in spring 1979 and other SIGs, notably RSTS, RT-11, Languages and Tools, and the 10/20 SIGs, had analogous distributions made in somewhat similar fashion. The distribution by copying only at the symposium was seen to be inadequate, so a
tree In botany, a tree is a perennial plant with an elongated stem, or trunk, usually supporting branches and leaves. In some usages, the definition of a tree may be narrower, including only woody plants with secondary growth, plants that are ...
of volunteers, each of whom would receive a copy of the material and make multiple copies for others, was devised. In these cases, the person desiring the material was expected to furnish blank media, as no money ever changed hands. The tapes grew in size constantly, and eventually moved to 8mm
Exabyte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit ...
media and to CDs, and then to DVDs. By that time nobody worried much about the relatively modest cost of blank media. The RSX SIG tapes continued until 1992, when material was drying up. Some RSX material was put on VMS SIG tapes after that, and around 1987 the Languages and Tools SIG tapes were merged in. The distributions continued to be released twice a year until 2005, and were released yearly in 2006 and 2007 when the tapecopy coordinator who had been making masters since the mid 1980s, Glenn Everhart, retired from the role. By that time, network distribution had become good enough that media copy was no longer necessary in most places. The SIG tapes contained a large variety of material which has been useful as examples of
prior art Prior art (also known as state of the art or background art) is a concept in patent law used to determine the patentability of an invention, in particular whether an invention meets the novelty and the inventive step or non-obviousness criteria f ...
in patent disputes. They always favored distribution of full sources (and occasionally did omitted binary-only submissions), making them match what patent examiners understand as "publication". DECUS media have always been available to anyone in the public, just more awkward for some to obtain than for others. The DECUS U.S. Chapter conducted technical conferences at various locations, and ran other operations like Local User Groups (LUGs) and Special Interest Groups. Chapters in other nations did likewise. DECUS also promoted the open exchange of user-developed software, largely via magnetic media. DECUS played a critical role in the development of
computer games A personal computer game, also known as a PC game or computer game, is a type of video game played on a personal computer (PC) rather than a video game console or arcade machine. Its defining characteristics include: more diverse and user-deter ...
in North America in the 1970s. The pioneering titles ''
Adventure An adventure is an exciting experience or undertaking that is typically bold, sometimes risky. Adventures may be activities with danger such as traveling, exploring, skydiving, mountain climbing, scuba diving, river rafting, or other extreme spo ...
'' by
Will Crowther William Crowther (born 1936) is an American computer programmer, caver, and rock climber. He is the co-creator of ''Colossal Cave Adventure'' from 1975 onward, a seminal computer game that influenced the first decade of video game design and ins ...
; ''
Baseball Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each, taking turns batting and fielding. The game occurs over the course of several plays, with each play generally beginning when a player on the fielding tea ...
'', ''
Dungeon A dungeon is a room or cell in which prisoners are held, especially underground. Dungeons are generally associated with medieval castles, though their association with torture probably belongs more to the Renaissance period. An oubliette (from ...
'' and ''
Star Trek ''Star Trek'' is an American science fiction media franchise created by Gene Roddenberry, which began with the eponymous 1960s television series and quickly became a worldwide pop-culture phenomenon. The franchise has expanded into vari ...
'' by
Don Daglow Don Daglow (born circa 1953) is an American video game designer, programmer, and producer. He is best known for being the creator of early games from several different genres, including pioneering simulation game ''Utopia'' for Intellivision in ...
, and '' Hunt the Wumpus'' by
Gregory Yob Gregory Yob (June 18, 1945 – October 13, 2005) was an American computer game designer. Early life Gregory was born in Eugene, Oregon. An article about his experiment on simulating gravitational fields with droplets of water on a soap b ...
provided a foundation for the games industry. One of the first real-time interactive multi-user games, '' MTrek'' (MultiTrek), was also distributed on DECUS tapes. Major commercial game titles including ''
Zork ''Zork'' is a text-based adventure game first released in 1977 by developers Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. The original developers and others, as the company Infocom, expanded and ...
'' and ''
Empire An empire is a "political unit" made up of several territories and peoples, "usually created by conquest, and divided between a dominant center and subordinate peripheries". The center of the empire (sometimes referred to as the metropole) ex ...
'' were first popularized by DECUS. In the 1990s, DECUS played a significant role in integration of isolated post-Soviet scientific, technology, and business communities into the worldwide community. In 1998,
Compaq Compaq Computer Corporation (sometimes abbreviated to CQ prior to a 2007 rebranding) was an American information technology company founded in 1982 that developed, sold, and supported computers and related products and services. Compaq produced ...
acquired Digital, and DECUS became a Compaq user group. In 2000, the DECUS U.S. Chapter incorporated as the independent user group Encompass. In 2002,
Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. HP developed and provided a wide variety of hardware components ...
acquired Compaq, and DECUS became an HP User Society. In 2008, the HP user communities Encompass, ITUG, and HP Interex EMEA consolidated to form Connect Worldwide.


Local chapters

Membership was organized by country. Each chapter acted as part of the worldwide Association of Hewlett-Packard User Groups. DECUS had some 7,500 members, mostly system, network, and applications specialists as well as IT Managers. Association activities: The HP User Society DECUS promoted the exchange of information and know-how between its members, manufacturers and partners. The association supported its members in the representation of their interests against HP and partners, helped in problem solving and facilitates formation of opinion and advanced training by organizing events.


Well-known members

Some early and well-known members of DECUS were the late Terry Shannon and John R. Wisniewski.


See also

*
Connect (users group) The Connect User Community is a 501(c)(6) nonprofit association, an independent user community for Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). Connect is a group of more than 70,000 HP customers, partners and employees. It resulted from the merger in May, ...
*
History of free software In the 1950s and 1960s, computer operating software and compilers were delivered as a part of hardware purchases without separate fees. At the time, source code, the human-readable form of software, was generally distributed with the software p ...


References


External links

*
Connect

HP User Society DECUS München e.V.

Digital Equipment Computer Users Society Proceedings and Publications, 1962-1992
Charles Babbage Institute The IT History Society (ITHS) is an organization that supports the history and scholarship of information technology by encouraging, fostering, and facilitating archival and historical research. Formerly known as the Charles Babbage Foundation, ...
, University of Minnesota.
DECUS Library Compendium
{{DEFAULTSORT:Decus Computer clubs Digital Equipment Corporation Software developer communities Organizations established in 1961 Organizations disestablished in 2008