President's Notes (05/08)
President's Message
Dr. Saul Lowitt honored with Lifetime Membership
by Phil Sorrentino
Member of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc.
Dr. Saul Lowitt, the founder of the Sarasota PC
Users Group, was honored at the April
meeting with an SPCUG Lifetime Member Award. Dr. Lowitt and SPCUG are inextricably connected now and forever. This seems appropriate considering SPCUG is Dr. Lowitt’s baby. I would like to take this opportunity to introduce those of you who don’t know Dr. Lowitt to him, and the events that spawned SPCUG. Most of what follows can be found on the SPCUG
Website under “Past Presidents”. To give you an idea of the beginning of SPCUG, this is what Saul had to say about the first meeting, “The first club meeting was held at my home in April 1982, and six people were present.” We’ve come a long way.
Saul Lowitt is a many faceted person. Besides being the founder of SPCUG and its President from Oct. ’82 to May. ‘83, he has interests in running, as evidenced by his running six marathons including the NYC marathon, in education, as evidenced by his several university degrees, in music, theater and ballet. Saul has lived in Sarasota since 1973. Most of what follow is taken from an interview with Saul in 1996. The following quotes from Dr. Lowitt show how SPCUG began over 25 years ago.
“I bought an IBM PC for $6,600 in September of 1982 and I didn’t know
what to do with it.”
“I was desperate! ComputerLand was the only vendor of IBM (PCs), under Cy Shedelbower. I asked him for his customer records for a mailing list to start a users group. That was before PC Magazine and PC World were published. Cy Shedelbower said, “Sure you could.” And I asked Dr. George Petrie, my friend, who was a Vice-President of IBM and knew Tom Watson, senior, junior, and Arthur K. Watson, if he would come with me to ComputerLand. We went to ComputerLand, and compiled a mailing list.”
“Then I wrote a letter to everybody using EDLIN, because I didn’t have a word processor. I didn’t even know about WordStar.”
“The first meeting was at my house with five people attending. And for the second meeting we had a salesperson from ComputerLand talk about BASIC.”
“We continued to have meetings and luckily, there was a wonderful guy who wrote the newsletter, because the newsletter writing was a very important part of creating the user’s group.”
“I resisted staunchly things like dues, formation of a 501c3 charitable organization, officers. I resisted anything which meant an organization because that wasn’t me. And that’s certainly in contrast with today.”
“I functioned as president from October 1982 to May 1983 without any other officers, just a newsletter chairman—and without dues. Any expenses came out of my pocket. The biggest meeting under my tutelage was about fifteen members,”
“I resigned as president in May 1983, continued as a member, but I couldn’t run the organization because I was in Tampa. Immediately, in Tampa I found a dearth of knowledge about PCs. Therefore, I formed, and became the first president of the University of South Florida PC User’s Group, which still exists.”
From these quotes, you can see how insightful Dr. Saul Lowitt is, and what lead him to start the Sarasota PC Users Group. I’m sure you will all agree with me when I say “Thank you to Dr. Lowitt. You are a true visionary”, and congratulate him on becoming a lifetime member of SPCUG. :
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Copyright 2008. This article is from the May 2008 issue of the
Sarasota PC Monitor, the official monthly publication of the Sarasota
Personal Computer Users Group, Inc., P.O. Box 15889, Sarasota, FL
34277-1889. Permission to reprint is granted only to other non-profit
computer user groups, provided proper credit is given to the author and
our publication. We would appreciate receiving a copy of the publication
the reprint appears in, please send to above address, Attn: Editor. For
further information about our group, email:
admin@spcug.org/ Web:
http://www.spcug.org/
The Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc. has 1,100+ members
and was established in 1982. We are members of the Assoc. of PC User
Groups (APCUG), the Florida Assoc. of PC Users Groups, Inc., and we are
members of the America Online Ambassador Program.
See http://www.spcug.org for all reviews from the Sarasota PC
Monitor, go to the Newsletter Section.