The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group
Getting To Know the Special Interest Groups
Noel Peters
 noelp@melbpc.org.au

It is a grey Melbourne Sunday morning, actually the first such for a long time, because after an extended serve of glorious swimming weather and a prolonged rainless period we have had our first decent shower of rain yesterday and the residue of that is still around. What does one do in these circumstances? 

Well, if it is the third Sunday of the month you could look in at 10.00 am to the monthly meeting of the MACE Special Interest Group at our Dorcas Street clubrooms. 

The What? 

If you were previously unaware of it, MACE stands for Melbourne Atari Computer Enthusiasts and this group of Melb PC members include some of the people who in former times made up a computer club devoted to using and promoting interest in the Atari range of computers.

When IBM's design of personal computers became the more popular choice of home users, alternative machines such as the Commodore, Amiga, Sinclair, Tandy and other once popular brands lost favour despite machines like the Atari being very good with music and other applications, their user base dwindled. However a hardy band of stalwarts continued with the Atari club until it was seen that putting into force the dictum "If you can't beat them, join them" was the way to go and so, to remain viable, the club came under the umbrella of Melb PC User Group a couple of years ago and lives on as a very special one of our SIGs.


Figure 1. Roger Davies at the Atari Falcon

 Taking my own advice I turned up at the March meeting of MACE and endeavoured to give the impression I was not completely lost with screen after screen of an unfamiliar operating system, GUIs I had never seen previously and applications with names like Papyrus and Calamus. 

The proceedings were under the leadership of Roger Davies aided and abetted by co-convener Graham Hurford. Roger used his Atari Falcon, one of the last models of Atari made and featuring some 14 MB of useable RAM to demonstrate the "Magic" operating system and to show some aspects of Papyrus. The latter I found was a suite of programs comprising word processor, spreadsheet and database not unlike Works, a suite you probably know about released by a certain other software supplier. 

Then came Calamus, which is a Desktop Publishing program for Atari. The User Helping User principle was to the fore as the picture shows Roger endeavouring to access the contents of a portable hard drive brought along by a member from his Atari Falcon. There is much ongoing work in exporting Atari format programs to write them to CDs on Windows driven machines and a lot of fun being had in the process. I noted some applications featured German captions and understand it is still possible to purchase a new Atari type computer in Germany. 

Still Sunday, still grey and overcast, but at 12.30 pm time to get across to the English Language School at 120 Eley Road Blackburn South to catch the East Workshop run by Ken Gubbins and look in on the start of the Genealogy SIG with Bruno Dik after the Beginners East SIG run by Gary Taylor.

As the SIG notes for the workshop say: The East Workshop is hands-on, practical, and interactive and runs on the principle "Show me how and I'll do it myself with your assistance"

We handle "how to upgrade", "software doesn't run", "slow computer", no sound no video" problems and more. Bring your computer along. 

And the members do, there were more than a dozen computers from 486/33 to 600MHz PIIIs with their owners there, and with a range of problems like Outlook Express not collecting more than one e-mail at a time, to a CD-ROM drive that intermittently played music but would not read data. The picture shows a sample of the workshop area only, so you can see this is a very popular place to be on the Sunday following the East SIG main meeting each month. 


Figure 2. A section if the East Workshop

It is not hard to see that our user group is really as diverse, as you will by now undoubtedly have come to realize, I am apt to opine from time to time, and further that Users Helping Users is more than just a slogan.

Reprinted from the May 2001 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia