Vol. 1, #3, May 10, 1975

NEW CLUB STARTS IN SAN FRANCISCO

The San Francisco Chapter of the Home Brew Computer Club met April 23 at 54 Winfield St. S. F. We discussed the use of a Cybercom key to tape encoder as a means of preparing data for a community bulletin board. Bob has one in use at the 24th St. Component Shop which Terry has modified for CRT display. The Cybercom acts like a key-punch machine with 120 characters per record and 400 records per tape. It is capable of searching slowly for a keyword. Admittedly a rather limited device, but Bob feels we should make do with what we have or can salvage. The true amateur spirit.

This Chapter is to be a work/project oriented club. Bring the design for your widget and build it with the mutual help of others doing the same. Bob has test equipment, components, and a workbench available. "Our goal is to give each other concrete practical help in constructing home brew equipment. So if you are having any trouble with your project feel free to ask for help.” Here’s your chance: implement your dream, no more excuses!

We discovered much interest in information indexing, storage, and retrieving. We got into the whole subject of data banks, information processing, etc., and realized that the important thing is to put people in touch with people, not data or documents. Some excerpts:

Bob: “you have so many people in society exercising an editorial function. In essence I see an electronic community bulletin board as uniquely different in that you are your own librarian. You select what it is that you are going to read of what is in the data bank.”

Fritz: “To what level do you go with this? You got all these vectors in this beautiful space: one dimension is name, one is address, one is interest, etc. Then you step back and class a selected group of vectors with another name, and so on, and you go crazy at a certain point-know what I mean? you are so abstract at some point. How do you wade thru all the garbage?”

Several of us want to see developed some kind of public memory like a bulletin board having items or messages indexed by keywords. Something that is non-secrete and open to anyone at low or no cost. Maybe this can be a long-range project of the Club as a whole. Who else is interested in this?

Thanks to Steve for playing “Fool on the Hill” with his Altair for our enjoyment April 16. (See the next issue of P.C.C. for details of he did it.) Thanks to Terry for giving us a demo of his Temar TV Type-writer with the double-cursor formatting capability. Hope to see more of these around. A special thanks to Gordon for chairing the meetings and getting the club off to a great start. Lee Felsenstein has agreed to take on the job for a while. Thanks to every one for spreading the word. We have over 80 members. Bring your ideas, info, projects, and enthusiasm to share at the next meeting. See ya there.