SPACE:History/Origins

I am one of the original members of SPACE. I, Steve Howard and Chris Tiggemann started SPACE back in April 1982. At that time, TAIG was the only ATARI club in Mpls. TAIG meetings were in Chaska and they had about 150 members. We wanted a smaller club in the northern part of the Twin Cities. Steve, Chris and I were talking one day at work (UNIVAC) and the idea came up to start another ATARI club. But no one was willing to be president. The ball started rolling when Steve reluctantly volunteered. Chris volunteered to be vice president and I took the librarian job. We had several monthly meetings before we made the public announcement. Many people had expressed interest during those early months so we new the club had a chance to survive.

One of our first projects was to pick out a club name. Steve wanted the words "Saint Paul" in the name. I wanted "ATARI" included. Chris liked the ring of Twin City ATARI Interest Group or TAIG. So we made a list of words and started trying different combinations. It seemed like magic as SPACE was one of the first combinations that everyone liked. And we also agreed that our "temporary" name would be reviewed by the general club membership and they would pick a new permanent name. For some reason, our "temporary" name became permanent.

The first public meeting was in June 1982. I can't remember where the meeting took place - about 8 people showed up. After that meeting, we encountered some problems. Steve resigned and the meeting room was to small. That was a critical time as it seemed like our club foundation had vanished. Chris and I found out that Steve had volunteered, just to start the club and he had no intention of being the president. Steve was an author and he really wanted to write and publish the news letter. Out of nowhere, Ed Finegan stepped forward and replaced Steve. Ed found a new meeting hall on Lexington and Snelling - Minnesota Federal conference room. Our July meeting was a success with 13 people showing up.

At our August meeting, we had 17 ATARI enthusiasts. Steve published our first news letter that month. And I started gathering software for the library. TAIG had 35 disc's of public domain software. I made a deal with Phil Seifert of TAIG to purchase their DOM and redistribute that software in SPACE. Ed surveyed the 17 members and found 8 had the 810 Disk drive and 9 used the 410 Program Recorder for loading software. That meant I had to build 8 DOM's and 7 COM (Cassette Of the Month) each meeting.

The DOM's were easy to build as it took just a few minutes to copy the disc's. The COM's took a full day. I used 60 minute Radio Shack cassette tapes for the COMs. I wrote a basic program that copied all the DOM programs to my 410 Program Recorder. I would start a copy and return in 30 minutes, so I could flip the COM or start a new one. I was lucky if I got the job done in one day because the 410 Program Recorder was not too reliable. I also printed labels with counter numbers that approximated the start of the program.

To load a COM program, you used the 410 counter to position the cassette. Then by pushing the PLAY button, you listened for a long silence in the tones. That meant you must have found the gap between programs. You typed in "LOAD C:" and waited for the computer to beep. Then you quickly depressed PLAY on the 410 and hopefully the program would load. The 410 was a "poor man's" loader and it was not too reliable. That meant the above process was sometimes repeated 3 or 4 times before you got a good load. It was near impossible to load a big program. And we found my 410 counter was different than everyone else so that added another problem. I swapped many COM"s because some worked for some people, and not others. What a time we had with our new toy!

It was really encouraging to go to each meeting. We usually signed up 5 to 10 new members each month. And TAIG really grew - from Aug. 1982 to April 1983 there membership grew from 185 to 358 people. I don't have any numbers for SPACE - my guess is about 100 in April 1983. By this time SPACE and TAIG limited COM's to 5 programs per side because of reliability problems. And by now most people were using disk drives as the price dropped from $459 to $229. We charged $4 for DOM or COM. 5.25 inch disc's, in those days, were $2.25 each. ATARI 800 sold for $499 and the 400 went for $200. An ATARI 400 full stroke keyboard was $125 to $250. The 410 Program Recorder sold for about $80. And the 850 interface went for $250 if you could find one. My Epson, state of the art, MX-80 dot matrix printer cost $459 and for $80 more, I could buy EPROM's that printed graphics. The Anchor Signalman 300 baud modem sold for $99. The popular magazines were COMPUTE!, 250 pages at $2.50 and Creative Computing at $2.50. COMPUTE! really supported ATARI and they usually devoted about 100 pages. They had type in software and informative articles from ATARI founding fathers like Chris Crawford. All that cost put quite a drain on our pocket books - no wonder the wife was afraid of bankruptcy.

I remember starting many "new" events. SPACE birthday parties, swap meets, paper library, and the 65K upgrade. In Feb. 1983, Steve Berglund figured out how to add memory to his ATARI 400 and I organized a 65K upgrade SIG (Special Interest Group). $85 got you 65K installed on your ATARI 400. Remember that up to this time, most of us had 16K machines which ran 90% of software available. Now my 400 could compete with those 800's with 48K. I think this was one of the first memory upgrades and it seemed we started an avalanche - all you saw advertised after that was memory upgrades. It did not take long for software to catch up with the 65K. And in about 6 months, all you saw was large programs and 48K machines.

Looking back in my notes I see names like Glen Kirschenmann paid $4 for Aug. 1982 COM. In Sept. 1982, Glen submitted COMPUTE! type in software to the library. Sherm Erickson in Nov. 1982 was working with the mail order cassette library. In Jan. 1983, Sherm wrote an article for the news letter explaining the COM mail order procedures and charges. At the Feb. 1983 meeting, Sherm and Rich Mier were working with Preppie! and cassette backup. Sherm and Rich also offered their computers and TV's for club demonstrations.

Our club has come along way since 1982. Somehow, the club survived! I have always though the ATARI 400/800 are well though out and well documented computers. And they are a fast (machine language), 8 bit machines. They keep living on. I hope to see many of you at the SPACE meetings for years to come.