i used to go to the TRS-80 users group (later became the TRS-80/Video Genie user group, mainly cos my dad had started selling VG’s and he lobbied for the change) with my dad in the early/mid 80’s, held in a rugby club in wilford weekly, loads of great characters and discussions about EEPROM writing, machine language, programming the Z80 and the sublime beauty of the
RS-232 interface (still a standard in many high level computing connections) of course i went for the crisps and fizzy drinks and of course the other children of electronics engineers, medical physicists and mathematicians.
It was through this i got my first paid work in the arts, designing awful cassette covers for Marc Leduc’s awful Scott Adams Adventure rip offs like ‘Find The Diamond Of Balmorlan’, i think it was he who showed me that if you press ‘break’ you could view the guts of the
program and edit your own narritive into it, so i remixed a shit maze chase game into ‘Death Droid’ and gave it to people at school.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/08/the-golden-age-of-computer-user-groups/