Title: ACCU – The Early Days (Part 1)

Author: Bob Schmidt

Date: 07 November 2017 16:57:35 +00:00 or Tue, 07 November 2017 16:57:35 +00:00

Summary: Francis Glassborow recalls how the ACCU came about.

Body: 

Back when my career as a teacher was coming to a close (stress-related ill-health was the proximate cause, but that is another story), in June of that same year, I came across a small ad in a news-stand magazine (Computer World, if memory serves me correctly) for the C User Group (UK). I thought it might be interesting and sent off my £10 for membership and six issues of its newsletter. I soon received a mimeographed A4 newsletter titled C Vu, which largely consisted of reprints from the US based CUG (long deceased, and which continued as a ghost organisation for a number of years having been absorbed by its newsletter, The C Users Journal, which had grown up to being a glossy print publication). By the way, try searching the Web for ‘C magazines’; not at all the results you might expect. In addition, the Wikipedia entry is completely wrong, not least because both CVu and Overload continue as print magazines. Anyone got the time to get them to correct the entry?

After several months, the next issue had not materialised on my doormat so, before actually giving up and assuming that it was a transient publication, I rang the contact number for Martin Houston that was on the issue I had (I think it was issue 4) to ask what had happened to the next issue. He told me that there wasn’t one yet, but that my telephone call was very timely as he was planning a meeting to discuss the future of CUG(UK) for January. He had booked a room at the Aeronautical Institute in London.

I decided that I would go and that was one of those momentous decisions that seem so unimportant when they are made. I arrived in a very luxurious room to find a couple of dozen other C enthusiasts.

The discussion that ensued began to meander. Being an old hand at taking control of meetings, I looked around and suggested that we had just about what we needed for a Committee. Martin Houston was obviously the person for the chair and I volunteered to be membership secretary (well, it seemed a pretty harmless job). Someone volunteered as secretary and someone else as editor. I am afraid that I have forgotten the names, though I guess a bit of digging could bring them to light.

I next addressed the issue of regular publication. I pointed out that people would only write articles in a timely fashion if they had deadlines and a regular publication schedule. The original decision was for it to be quarterly. As we will see, that was not to last very long.

The meeting closed and I started find computer-interest events that I could beg a free table at to publicise CUG(UK). That brought me in contact with a lot of interesting people, including Alan Lenton. It also resulted in my being invited to a lunch with the person responsible for the computer books at Addison Wesley. Out of that contact grew our wide reviewing coverage of programming books. I can still recall a conversation at one show with the representative for Wiley’s. She made some remark about editors who just asked for review copies of books because they wanted them for their personal bookshelves. I replied that, in all honesty, I did the same. I can remember the smile on her face when she told me that I was not like those other editors because, unlike them, I read and reviewed the books before putting them on my shelf.

Enough for this episode. Next time (if the editor likes the idea) I will tell you how I came to be editor of CVu and how I had the nerve to tell Bjarne Stroustrup that the 2nd edition of The C++ Programming Language was much better than the first.

Notes: 

More fields may be available via dynamicdata ..