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.