The Best of THE TORPET

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The Best of THE TORPET Plus More for the Commodore 64 and The VIC-20 was a book published by the TORPET Commodore 'only' magazine in Canada. Their start was only preceded by The Paper, which merged with The Midnite Gazette, And the Transactor published by Commodore. Their first issue was released in November, 1980 under the banner of TPUG, (Toronto Pet User Group). Subsequent issues were released under the TORPET banner. By December, 1983 their printings per issue were at 32,000. In 1983 there were dozens of club magazines in circulation, with many using reprints from TORPET.

Publication members of TORPET were, Bruce Beach, Jean Beach, Darrin McGugan, Sue Spires, and Gottfried Walter. Unknown is whether TORPET was renamed from TPUG as a result of a split with the TPUG group or whether it was just an extension of the private enterprise style of TPUG. I am assuming TORPET was an extension of the group.

When The Best of THE TORPETT was published (1983 ? ) They had a listing of 69 diskettes availabe that sold for $10.00 each or $350 for the set.

Lyman Duggan, an Employee of Marconi started the group first called called Club 2001, after the PET 2001. Starting up sometime in 1979, with sixteen members, charged five dollars for attendance, and served coffee and doughnuts. His wife, Cherie, had cassette tapes containing contributed programs which sold for a dollar or two.

Attendance grew rapidly, and Duggan had to seek out ever larger sites for the meetings. Then, with little warning, his employee posted him to Florida. Duggan quickly nominated a board of directors to replace him, and TPUG became a member’s club.

Brett Butler, one of the first PET owners in the Toronto area, who wrote a tiny program for his wife who was in the late stages of pregnancy: tap any key, and the PET would show time elapsed since the previous contraction.

Computer enthusiasts were regarded as mavericks. Few of those who worked in the field of data processing would have any association with microcomputers. I suspect the reasons for this are varied. Perhaps there would be a loss of corporate prestige to admit that those little thousand-dollar machines were capable of taking on some tasks, when DP personnel had million-dollar machines as their private domain. It seemed that some users would believe only what IBM told them; and, at that time, IBM had no interest in giving any credibility to these pesky little machines.

There were rebels. A Vice President of Air Canada used a Commodore PET to plan fuel needs at various airports; but he had to hide his machine from the DP mavens, who didn’t approve. A regional education officer in northern Ontario supported microcomputers in schools, and helped assembly a body of educational software; all the while, the Department of Education wanted all educational flow to be centralized.

TPUG prospered, and its influence went far beyond Ontario’s boundaries, or even those of North America. Today, it may be difficult to comprehend the difficult in distributing free programs across the country or around the world. We use the internet. Back then, you put cassette tapes in the mail, or, later, floppy disks. And a central clearing point produced better organization. TPUG was it, for many years; most Commodore clubs across North America became associate TPUG members.

Membership reached a peak in 1984 of about 17,000 members. TPUG now had a full-time staff for handling memberships and mailing requested programs, and another full-time staff to publish the TPUG magazine. There was a lot of money flowing into TPUG.

An early online service, “The Source” opened for business in 1979, and was soon followed by another, Compuserve. A service specific to the Commodore 64, Quantum, became available in 1985. There started to be other ways to distribute programs. And the internet was coming.

Online services, and a shift to other manufacturers computers, caused a further decline in membership. And this caused disputes to become more pronounced. It’s easy to bring in new equipment and new staff in prosperous times; it’s not so easy to start cutting back. Many old-timers dropped out of the TPUG picture. But TPUG survived, and is still active today, and still has an online store.

Two notable members of TPLUG were Jim Butterfield, author of The First Book of KIM, Learning Machine Code Programming on the Commodore 64 ( and other Commodore computers ), Machine Language Programming For the Commodore 64: Commodore 64 Book/ and 64K disk, Commodore Reference Manual, Machine Language for the Commodore 64,128, and other Commodore computers (Revised).

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http://users.telenet.be/kim1-6502/6502/fbok.html

The next Notable was Bruce Beach editor of The Best of THE TORPET.

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http://www.ki4u.com/webpal/beach.htm