DFWCUG History

Back in the late 80's, when most of you were still in geometry class, Tom O'Keefe, Beau Williamson and Ken Cooper were playing with real computers with a command line interface and assembler language. All three guys were active in the Digital Equipment Computer Users Society (DECUS) - but in the early 90's the industry changed.

The DEC VAX computers were being phased out to a new breed of workstations running the UNIX operating system. Tom and Ken moved into the UNIX world and found UNIX more challenging than the VAX Clusters front-ending the Cray supercomputers.

Beau disappeared for a while but then surfaced working for a small router company based in California known as Cisco Systems. Eventually, all three of us ended up in the networking arena, either as independent consultants or as Cisco employees. But we missed the knowledge share and get-togethers with our fellow mates that we enjoyed in the good old VAX days.

Then in 1996, Cisco held their first Dallas based Networkers user conference and guess who showed up, the three packet-heads. We discussed it for a bit, then put together a birds-of-a-feather room to see if anyone would be interested in starting a Cisco Users Group. To our delight, 72 people showed up - and the rest is history.

We now host the first, and world's largest single Cisco Users Group right here in Dallas Texas. We have over 2,000 real members and have assisted in starting many other CUGs in the US. Come see us at our next meeting and meet your fellow packet-heads.