 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group First Ever Family Life Membership George Skarbek and David Webster gskarbek@melbpc.org.au |
At the May monthly meeting, I had the pleasure of handing a long
overdue and well deserved Life Membership Certificate to the Webster Family. David, who joined the
group in 1987, put up his hand and served as a committee member two tears later, in about 1989. The
entire Webster family has given many years to the group since then. We asked David to put together
a few memories. Here is a brief history of the last 10 years in the Melb PC shareware back
room.
David Webster tells the story
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Glenn always accompanied me to the monthly meetings at Clunies Ross House in Parkville. When I volunteered and assisted Leon Cohen, Doug Brooke and (the late) John Beck on the Shareware Library, Glenn helped other members by discussing some of the games and other programs in the Library. At this time the Library was held on 360 KB floppy disks, as
masters. Disks were provided to members by using bit copiers to make copies of the master disks.
Some high density disks were becoming more prevalent at this time. The high density disks could not
be copied on the bit copying equipment so we found a means of storing these masters on a hard disk.
Later the entire shareware library was transferred to a hard disk as hard disk drive prices
decreased and capacities increased. |
The boys and I were members of several Bulletin Board Services and we used those to obtain files for the Library. We also visited the computer swap meets at Malvern and Camberwell to purchase shareware CDs as soon as they became available. Sometimes we purchased shareware diskettes (from other vendors) if we found titles that were not already in the Library. Authors also regularly sent us updated disks.
When the federal government legislated for the classification of computer games and other software the availability of the shareware CDs decreased dramatically, so we imported our own copies from overseas. This meant the there was always a ready supply of new and updated titles.
As bulletin board systems closed we began obtaining more and more titles via the Internet. Yvonne was involved in the unglamorous but nevertheless essential task of formatting, preparing and checking the master diskettes each month, prior to archiving them on the hard disk.
Up to fifty new and updated disk titles were added to the library each month during the mid 1990s. At this time all four of us were involved in examining disk titles to check their suitability and to provide a suitable description for the monthly column in PC Update.
Other family commitments in recent years have interfered and this meant we had less time available to provide the proper care and maintenance required to maintain the Library. Yvonne and I were still copying disks for members at the monthly meetings until we retired at the end of last year.
The "Webster Family" would like to thank all of the members
of Melb PC for their support over the years, and to remind members that shareware is still
available from the office and the monthly meetings.
Reprinted from the June 2001 issue of PC Update,
the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
