History of BSDG

BSDG actually pre-dates my (Jim McKeeth - DavinciUnltd.com & McKeeth.org) involvement. As far as I know Steve Dahlin started the group as a Clipper users group, but I am not sure when that was. Rich Hundausen took over in 1995 or 1996 and changed it to a Delphi users group (registering the famous Delphi.org domain name!) Steve Garland (of AstaTech) took over from Rich, and after a few years it became the Boise Visual Developers (or BVD like the underware) group to expand its focus now that in addition to Delphi, Visual Studio was a viable development tool . In 2000 I took over and changed the name to Boise Software Developers Group (although debated going back to the Delphi users group), but it is still frequently referred to as the Boise Delphi group. Chris Brandsma (Programmers on Fire and Elegant Code) took over in October of this year - 2007. Hopefully it will continue on for many more years and many more leaders.

Hopefully the others will help me flush this out with some more dates or anything I may have missed. Stay tuned!

Steve Dahlin added:

Actually, the group started as a completely separate Delphi group which I organized. I hosted for the first few months and then others took over after I had suffered complete burnout. The first meeting was held on the 2nd floor of the Central Plaza bldg which is part of the WGI [Washington Group International] complex [where it currently meets].

Richard Hundhausen added:

Wow, very cool. I had forgotten about the lineage myself.

Jim forgot to tell you that during the Clipper user group days, each week we would hassle Steve Dahlin on his choice of screen colors.

(I've heard about Steve's color choices.)

Doug Reece added (and I was negligent in not including him in the history. Sorry Doug!)

I just read your post about the history of BSDG and found it interesting. I also thought that I'd add a bit more info. I was at the meeting where Rich nominated Steve Garland to take over the group. Steve seemed a bit reluctant to take on the job by himself. By this time, Steve and I had become well acquainted and that same evening, he asked me if I'd co-lead the group with him, which I agreed to. I eventually ran many of the meetings myself (Steve's participation became less frequent). I was the one that suggested to Steve that we ask [Jim] to consider taking over leadership of the group, and it was I who actually communicated with you about that.

While Rich was leading the group, we met at (the place he worked, which was some government agency I can't remember). During the time Steven and I ran the group, we met at Executrain at its old location on Executive Drive by HP. It wasn't uncommon to lock people out at that location since the doors were automatically locked after 7:00 pm. I believe that we were still meeting there when [Jim] took over, but then quickly relocated to the place [Jim was] working.