1987 -1994: The SMUG International SIG and the early days of IMUG
In the fall of 1987, Yuan Ho and Seth Schneider met in a local Palo Alto, CA, Apple Computer dealer store. Yuan, an early multilingual Mac enthusiast, and Seth, who later would go on to found Multilingual Computing Magazine, agreed that the time was right to form a Macintosh user group with an international focus.
Seth succeeded in gaining support and sponsorship at Stanford University, and soon Seth and Yuan began organizing monthly meetings of the Stanford Macintosh User Group International Special Interest Group (a.k.a. SMUG I-SIG).
Early topics included software localization, font design, dedicated multilingual software applications, and the use of foreign languages in mainstream software products. Meetings were held in a basic Stanford classroom, with a slide projector. Publicity, such as it was, took the form of copied handwritten flyers like the one you see here, and announcements in local newspaper event calendars. Nevertheless, word of the International SIG spread far beyond the Stanford Campus.
In the fall of 1990 I-SIG membership passed the 100 mark. At one meeting, seven companies demonstrated their Japanese language software to a packed room of over 60 attendees. That same year, Seth Schneider moved to Idaho to start Multilingual Computing, and handed the reigns to IMUG co-founder Yuan Ho. Yuan continued to produce fascinating meetings with the support of the membership, including a March 1991 presentation on Unicode by Lee Collins of Apple Computer, announced in the flyer pictured above.
A New MUG is Born
In the summer of 1991, when the future of SMUG appeared to be in doubt due to lack of student involvement, Yuan Ho spun off the popular I-SIG as the "International Macintosh Users Group". Yuan obtained formal recognition of IMUG from Apple Computer and Adobe Systems, and further increased the visibility of IMUG as a forum for multilingual, multiscript computing.
Apple Computer has provided IMUG with a conference room at their headquarters for many years. Apple employees volunteering as official hosts have included Mimi Obinata, Norbert Lindenberg, Kathryn Phipps, Joe Cannan, Terry Rawlings, David Murphy and many others. Their support is much appreciated to this day.
From Snail-Mail to Web Mail
January 1992 saw the birth of IMUG's monthly newsletter. The height of high-tech at the time, newsletter articles were delivered via e-mail or on disk via "sneakernet", printed out on a dot-matrix printer and "snail-mailed" to the IMUG membership. Edited by Mimi Obinata, the premier issue featured work by Jim Loomis, Ken Lunde and Roger Sherman.
In 1994 Jim Turley and Andrew Kirk made a presentation on this new thing called the World Wide Web, demonstrating "MacSurfing the Internet" in Chinese and Japanese at the March monthly meeting. Then in April IMUG held a special event, the "Asia Internet Update & IMUG Group Surf" led by Jim, Andrew and others that drew over 300 attendees - a new record - and slew many trees in the production of 50-page handouts for each attendee.
In 1995 IMUG launched its own Web site, produced by Andrew Kirk, Norbert Lindenberg and Jim Turley. Although the snail-mail newsletter continued on through the late nineties, we knew something had changed.
