The Tacoma Open Group For Microcomputers started out as the Tacoma Osborne Group in June 1981.

Below is a copy of the original bylaws. The skeleton was developed by First Osborne Group in the San Francisco area and used by Osborne Groups all over the country to apply for 503C non-profit organizational status with the IRS..

We also had an Appendix A that was used to list the current list of officers and some other items, such as membership dues and list of officers, that would change from time to time. I believe the Bylaws and Appendix were held by the Secretary-Treasurer, and were, supposedly, updated each year to reflect the current status. If we root around enough maybe we can find a recent copy of an Appendix A.

I bought my brown case Osborne 1 (serial number in the 1800's) in 1980 from a music store in Seattle's University district. I've forgotten exactly but it was about $1895 or so and included the CP/M Operating System, the word processor WordStar, two programming languages MBasic and CBasic, and SuperCalc a spreadsheet modeled after VisiCalc. (As we learned later, VisiCalc was the program that saved Apple from "going under" by providing a useful application.) The database program DBase II was added to the package a year or so later.

The first meeting I went to was in a church basement in North Seattle (Beacon Hill?) and Joe Felsenstein was there. He was the brother of Lee Felsenstein the chief programmer for the Osborne computer. I obtained my first "free" software program there, namely DUU.COM which allowed you to go into the guts of a program and actually change some of the commands - if you dared! I often used it to UNdelete a file that had mistakenly been deleted. It was still there in memory or on disk but the first character in the filename hand been changed to something like E5. Change it back to its original value and you could use the file again. Magic!!

There I met Don Slaughter who formed a group meeting in SouthCenter, and Klaus Hagel who, with me formed the Tacoma Osborne Group in 1981 and met in the basement of the Library one block from Pacific Lutheran University. Claus was the first president of the group. I succeeded him in June 1982.

And the rest is history.