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The Ottawa TI-99/4A User's Group
A Canadian user group that contributed to the TI community

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The Ottawa TI-99/4A User's Group (OTIUG) was formed in 1980 to provide a forum for persons in the Ottawa, Canada area who had bought a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A Home Computer after its release in 1979. In 1981 the OTIUG started to support the TI-99/4A and later also supported the Myarc Geneve. During the fifteen years of its existence the OTIUG had many accomplishments of its own and helped many of its members go on to make their own significant contributions to the TI community.

The OTIUG 'NEWSLETTER' was very well supported by many of its members who contributed articles on a variety of subjects. It enjoyed wide distribution because of out of town members and through exchanges with other user groups. Some significant articles included:

• A series of tutorials entitled "Fast Extended Basic" by Lucie Dorais, an avid Extended BASIC programmer that was published from September 1987 to March 1995. The OTIUG also distributed these articles and programs as annual sets of Freeware disks. Many of these articles were republished in MICROpendium and in many other user group newsletters. Lucie held the post of President and newsletter editor during the later years of the group.
• Bill Sponchia wrote a series of articles titled "Hints, Tips and Answers" that ran for a number of issues and was also distributed as a Freeware disk. Bill compiled this information after reading newsletters from many other user groups and presented it under the following headings: Assembly Language, Basic & Extended BASIC, Multi-Plan, PR Base, TI-Writer and Miscellaneous.
  
• R. Art Green wrote many articles on a variety of subjects but always under a title of "A look at". In early 1985 this was "A look at the PRK module" and later that year it was "A look at GPLLNK". In 1986 he looked at speed, memory, Basic programs, Mini-Memory and TI-BASIC. In 1989 he resumed these articles with a series of articles entitled "A look at Assembler Language".
  
• David Caron wrote several series of articles starting in October 1986 with articles about the TI console, continuing with "Expansion Port Interfacing" starting in November 1987 and followed by "Expanding Extended Basic's Powers" starting in October 1988. David won a 1988 OTIUG software contest with his program Music Pro. Lucie Dorais made some changes and Asgard Software marketed the program.
  

The OTIUG supported the development of a number of programs and distribution of some of them as Freeware packages. Some of these included:

• DM 1000. Bruce Caron wrote this program and when he sold his TI system in June 1985 the OTIUG bought the source code and rights to DM 1000 from him. This source code was placed in the public domain and a number of other authors wrote upgrades to this very useful disk manager program.
  
• Texlink BBS. Bruce Caron and Bob Boone wrote the group's first Bulletin Board System program in Extended BASIC with Assembly Language support. Benoit Tanguay conceived the idea of an all-Assembly Language BBS, and with the support of the group, began to write Texlink. A change in circumstances made it impossible for him to continue, so Lloyd Galenzoski continued work on the project, adding the file transfer section with the help of Tom Bentley, using Xmodem transfer code. Later, maintenance of the program was passed on to Charles Earl, author of the Telco, terminal emulator program, and co-author with Tom Bentley of the Batch-It! program.
  
• Lloydtalk. A small Bulletin Board System and Terminal Emulator program written by Lloyd Galenzoski.

The OTIUG had an extensive disk library available to its membership. The catalogue of their library was maintained using Marty Kroll's CATLIB program.

For a long time the OTIUG BBS Sysop was Peter Arkin and he even continued on for a while after the group disbanded.

Membership in the OTIUG peaked at 163 members at the end of 1987 and had declined to 23 members when it disbanded in April 1995.

From 1986 to 1993 the OTIUG held a number of annual 'TI-Fest' fairs that were widely attended by TI99ers from many parts of Canada and the United States. The 2nd TI-Fest held at an Ottawa high school on May 17, 1987 was typical of these fairs and included the following highlights:

• Lou Phillips from Myarc Inc. and Walt Howe from the Boston Computer Society demonstrated the operation of the Geneve computer. Lou had intended to also bring a dozen new Geneve computers with him for sale but he had to leave them at the border because he and the group he was traveling with could not collectively cover the duty charges. Most of these Geneve computers were still sold at the fair and subsequently delivered.
  
• About 300 persons attended the fair including from the USA Lou Phillips, Walt Howe, Jeff Guide, Bud Mills and Barry Travers with his son.
  
• During the TI-Fest an attempt was made to establish a three-nation connection by using GENIE. The connection to the LA 99ers Computer Group Faire was successful but they could not establish a connection with a similar London event.
• Various TI hardware and software dealers were in attendance to display and demonstrate old and new TI products.
• A closing banquet was held at which Barry Travers was presented with an award as someone who made a significant contribution to the TI community. Lou Phillips and Terrie Masters had previously received this OTIUG award at fairs in Chicago and Boston.

In Walt Howe's report on this TI-Fest he says:"These Canadians include some remarkable people, and it is the people who make these events, not the hardware and software".

In addition to OTIUG members already mentioned above, others wrote and some have continued to write very useful programs for the TI community.

• Jeffrey Brown was one of its youngest members and wrote a terminal emulator program, called Term 80 that displayed small 80 column characters on a 40-column screen.
• Mike Brent (Tursi) wrote FlipTerm, a custom BBS program, Super Space Acer, a c99 game and went on to develop his 'Classic 99' TI emulator. He also worked on preparing the final 'NEWSLETTER' with Lucie Dorais and Jeffrey Brown.

The Ottawa TI-99/4A User's Group was an above the average TI-99 user group that contributed much to the TI community and also provided an atmosphere for many of its members to do the same.