Berkeley Macintosh Users Group

A few of the notable members include John "Captain Crunch" Draper, the Sultan of Brunei Hassanal Bolkiah, notorious murderer Enrique Zambrano,[5][6] early hacker-chaser Cliff Stoll, Inktomi founder Eric Brewer, and may prominent computing journalists like John Dvorak,[7] Ilene Hoffman, Leo Laporte and Adam Engst.

[8] BMUG's history and activities were closely linked with the MacWorld Expo meetings, traditionally held in San Francisco each January and Boston each August.

BMUG's primary revenue-generating activity was the sneakernet distribution of Macintosh shareware software from its comprehensive library on 400k and 800k 3.5" floppy disks.

[17][18] BMUG's shareware disk duplication and distribution program was run by Art Lau and Gerald Raddatz, supplemented by the efforts of many of the other volunteers.

Not to mention the incredible amount raw "Brainware" that was parlayed in the form of numerous famous and infamous guest speakers, which appeared and lectured at BMUG meetings.

One of the early successes for the group was BMUGNet, a variant of Apple's LocalTalk system which used standard telephone wires to connect Macintosh computers together in a local area network.

[19] Wiring plans were initially published in the Fall 1985 BMUG Newsletter, but members could purchase adapters assembled by the group.

[22] BMUG was famous for lively meetings, "We are in the business of giving away information" motto, "BMUG Awards", its great MacWorld Expo get-togethers, CD and book publishing, 400+ page biannual "newsletters" akin to the Whole Earth Catalog, and one of the largest shareware collections for Macintosh Public domain software sold to members and customers on floppy disks.

[23] BMUG hosted an enthusiastic weekly Thursday night meeting with questions and answers, and software demonstrations by vendors, followed at the end by a raffle.

Branch groups held general meetings in outlying areas, including San Francisco, Cupertino and Tokyo.

[24] BMUG's Bulletin board system or "BBS" was managed by Bernard Aboba (then in graduate school at Stanford and UC Berkeley, subsequently at Microsoft) with the assistance of Bill Woodcock.

The BMUG BBS also served as a nexus for the interoperability testing of email gateways between FidoNet, UUCP, SMTP, and a number of proprietary AppleTalk, NetWare, and Internet Protocol electronic mail systems, including CE Software's QuickMail,[25] SoftArc's FirstClass,[26] those from Information Electronics[27] and AppleLink Personal Edition, which went on to become America Online.

When the BBS host system in Berkeley was damaged by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, Aboba set up a temporary stand-in using a solid-state industrial PLC and multi-line serial controller, which was able to keep up with the heavy call volume by answering, presenting an ASCII banner explaining the situation, and immediately disconnecting.

[34][35] With the increasing cost of printing the biannual newsletter, decreasing membership and the waning sales of software due to the rise of the Internet, revenues could not keep up and the not-for-profit corporation declared bankruptcy in 2000.