The Carrier – Telecommunications Users Group

For nearly four years TUG created and published a newsletter. Most of them are available below.

Ken Coller, one of a few editors of The Carrier, provides an interesting perspective years later on May 12, 2021.

1983 was not that long ago when you consider what enthusiasts or hobbyists were involved in. For example, if you open up a magazine about cars from that era, they still have steering wheels. Homebuilders were still using saws and lumber. However, “The Carrier,” a record of the history of the Telecommunications Users Group, is as interesting for its production as it’s content. Computer networking had been in existence for only a couple of decades at that point, a very expensive and complicated undertaking. Home computer users attempting this kind of connectivity was an ambitious pursuit. People band together to solve problems as well as to form social units, and this was the result of TUG.

I hope you find the content quaint and possibly nostalgic. It would be good to remember the historical context, to reflect upon the amazing advances in technology and consumer goods that were mentioned in this newsletter. Simple word processing programs gave way to page layout software, transmission speeds became faster, and storage became more spacious. It was no longer necessary to write long articles about transmission protocols and how to properly make your own connection cables as these things were standardized. With the advent of graphical user interfaces and the most important invention of the 1980s — the laser printer — our newsletter began to resemble something that might be respectable. Perhaps it was more fun at the beginning when there were more problems to solve, but looking back upon how far we’ve come is a testament to the pioneers of home connectivity.