Description
On or about the first week of July, 1996 NTLUG was founded by Cole Jones, Stephen Denny, and Kendall Clark. By the second week of July, 1996 a very basic Web Site had been published using a small ISP acocunt. Stephen Denny and Hex.Net (now HyperUSA) had also agreed to host NTLUG's discuss and announce mailing lists. On September 14, 1996 NTLUG held its first meeting. Thanks to Sujay D'Souza and TCU's ACM chapter, this meeting was held at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. There were about 30 people there. At some point in the Fall of 1996, NTLUG asked Marvin Wu at SW Technology to donate a Pentium machine (Dora) to serve as the NTLUG online presence. SWT builds great machines and this one is rarely rebooted. (Dora is still alive ... btw). On October 19, 1996 we had our first technical presentation, Chris Parrott's Linux on Digital Alpha, came at the October meeting, which was the last at TCU. On November 9, 1996 we held our first meeting at the Dallas Infomart (warning, all flash site) in conjunction with Super Saturday and the DFW Xchange. Mike Dunn and Stuart Yarus have to get the credit for this; they made the whole thing happen and the rest of us have just been showing up every month since. To ring in 1997, on January 18, 1997 we held the first Linux Installation Project. Bill Petersen, Mike Dunn, and Tom Griffing made this happen by putting together hardware, software, and technical expertise. We also started selling Linux CDs from Linux Systems Labs -- very cool people, by the way -- which allows us to neglect other forms of group financing. By March 15, 1997, after some peripatetic days, the NTLUG Web Site finally finds a permament home at Novaré International (now Brainfood). These guys are hardcore Linux freaks, and they have treated NTLUG very well. On November 15, 1997 NTLUG celebrated its first anniversary by throwing a big geek party. 1998 was a growth year for NTLUG. We moved our web server to Hex.Net (thanks Stephen Denny). The dissolution of DFW Xchange, at least the user group part of it, left us trying to find a new home. We started averaging about 100 people per meeting ... so the new home had to have enough space....and had to be flexible enough to allow us to continue to run the LIP. In 1999, Travis Farral talked to his company, Nokia, about us meeting there....and PRESTO! Interestingly, we have seen even further growth in the group after leaving the Xchange. With close to 2000 people claiming membership and over 150 people at any given meeting, NTLUG has really come into its own space in 1999. Now the goal is incorporation (finally) and with that, our group will really be able to pursue fulfilling even greater dreams! In 2000, NTLUG incorporated. We set up our first board with 1 year, 2 year and 3 year board positions. Our first board: Mark Bickel, Stephen Denny (1yr); Christopher Browne, Kendall Clark (2yr); Rick Cook, Chris Cox, Stuart Yarus (3yr). Early 2000, VA Linux Systems (now VA Software) donated a VARstation to the group, it went on line as our server in Sep 2000 at hyperUSA. In September 2001, we transitioned to a new server donated by Bynari, Inc. that they provided bandwidth and rack space for us at thePlanet.com. In March 2003, the hosting arrangement became a donation direct from thePlanet.com. In March 2006, thePlanet.com was no longer able to provide housing for our server. We are currently being hosted on a shared web server by NTLUG's Patrick Michaud. Patrick is the creator of PmWiki, one of the best Wiki packages available.
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