Building a Community From Scratch

Posted by Tom Manos on May 20, 2009, 8:45 AM EDT

I'm not a very social person and am not a frequent blogger or forum poster. Although I have a facebook account, I have no idea why or what's in it.

But I am passionate about some things, and vintage computing is one of them. There are many like me: older nerds who remember a day when personal computers were more... well, personal. Today almost everything on a PC revolves around the web browser. My kids are surprised to find that we didn't always have web browsers. And in the older days, computer hardware and software technology was simpler, and it was easier to understand what was going on inside the box. Many (most?) users in the old days actually learned how to program their machines, even if only in the Basic programming language.

There is a fairly large group of people, both old and young, who still own, play with, program, and collect the old technology. I'm talking machines from the '70s, '80s, and very early '90s in some cases. We're talking Apple, TRS-80, Commodore Pet/64/128, Atari 500, very early UNIX systems, S-100 CP/M systems, DEC PDP-11 and Vax, early Sun workstations and the like. The list is really almost endless.

Many hobbies have community or social networking sites devoted to them, but not retro computing. There are collectors' sites, mailing lists, and a few businesses, but nothing that wraps it all up in a neat package. I though I would try to do that using ConcourseConnect as a vehicle.

So I built a server from our own Open Source code, configured it one morning, and started adding content. You can see the results at A Retro Computing Community:

http://community.pitlog.com/connect

It's very much a work in progress in terms of structure and content, but more importantly, it's an experiment in how to start a community of passionate members from scratch. It's not a community until the membership starts contributing, and I hope to find out how to help that process along.

Stay tuned for further developments as I get the site humming and encourage other folks to contribute.

Tom M.