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 the real computers... remember the ones with command
line interfaces and MACRO assembler language? All three guys were active in the Digital Equipment Computer Users
Society (DECUS) - but in the early 90's the industry began to change.
The VAX computers were being phased out to a new
breed of high-resolution color workstation running the UNIX operating systems. Tom and Ken moved into the UNIX
world to find them even more challenging and fun to play with than the VAX Clusters front-ending huge 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 cube 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 here
in Dallas Texas. We have just under 800 real members and have assisted in starting many other users groups in the
US. Come see us at our next meeting and meet your
fellow packet-heads.
The CUG - is an independent organization that we formed to help manage the Dallas / Fort Worth Cisco Users Group.
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