Emerald Coast Computer Society

EMERALD COAST COMPUTER SOCIETY HISTORY

The Emerald Coast Computer Society began in April 1983 as a forum in which the members could exchange ideas related to personal computers, assist each other, and to collect and distribute public domain software. At the time, the IBM PC had just hit the market and there were very few of them in this area. The most powerful commonly available personal computers ran the CP/M operating system from Digital Research. In many ways this operating system is the same lineage as PC-DOS/MS-DOS. The computers used Zilog Z80, Intel 8080, 8085, 8088,(used in the IBM PC), or 8086 microprocessors. While the computers differed a great deal in terms of hardware, the common operating system allowed many programs to be shared.

The actual beginning of the group was a meeting of Jim Jones, Mike Niswonger, and Joe Kocanowski in Jim's house one evening. This was followed by the first official meeting which took place on April 21, 1983 at Western Steer in Fort Walton Beach. Approximately 25 people attended that meeting, representing 21 computers of 13 different brands. The single largest representation was 3 IBM PCs. Systems were about equally split between 5" and 8" floppies, and 15 people had modems, 12 of which were limited to 300 baud. Prior to the next meeting, Jim, Mike and Joe drafted the first constitution and bylaws for the group. They also picked the first name for the group: The South Okaloosa County CP/M Users' Group. The constitution was adopted and officers elected at the May 26th meeting. The first officers were:

On January 3rd 1985, reflecting the increased dominance of the IBM PCs and compatibles in the group, our name was changed to Emerald Coast Computer Society.

Our library began with 150 volumes of CP/M software that Mike had gotten from the Central Florida Computer Society (located in Orlando). It grew to about 370 volumes of CP/M software and over 2000 volumes of PC-DOS/MS-DOS software. This growth was entirely due to the efforts of Mike Niswonger who had acquired the software through his connections with the Central Florida Computer Society, the PC-Blue library, and through purchases from the SIG/M.
Mike remained our librarian from our beginning until the very recent past.

Also of great significance were our chairmen who, over the years, directed the path that the group has taken. These were: Jim Jones, Mike Colandreo, Mike Meyers, Mike Niswonger, Charlotte Nicely, Jim Stevenson, Dan Chihos, Bob Richardson, and Walt Records.