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I’m not old enough to have been around in the day of the original user groups, but I’m pretty active on Meetup these days, finding other developers in my city u

• Insanity 7y ago
  Yeah same goes for me, I am activr in meetup groups and used to be in a "maker space" for more hardware-oriented stuff. (Toys like drones, 3D printers, Raspberry Pi stuff). I am curious about the difference as well - my guess is that now it's pretty mainstream so there's no real "group / niche" feeling. Certainly feel that way about some gaming communities I was in in the early 2000s.
• ohjeez 7y ago
  That's one reason I want to write this story! The shortest answer I can give you is that meetups are usually for a niche interest, such as programming. Most of the original user groups were far more general -- anything about microcomputers (my first group, on an island off the coast of Maine, was run by a guy with an Epson QX10 and another guy with an Amiga), or anything about IBM PC or Mac or whatever. So the demos were pretty wide ranging and had more variety. You'd have someone showing a graphics application one month (Arts & Letters) and a software utility the next (Norton Computing).