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Di Bawoh Rang Ikang Kering
Random Ramblings of A Retired Retainer

COMMODORE USERS EXCHANGE (CUE) IN MEMORY

Monday, October 04, 2004

1985 Amiga Posted by Hello

At about the same time Malaysia's first national car, the Proton Saga was launched; Malaysia's first users group for Commodore computer was born. I named the baby CUE for Commodore Users Exchange and published BarbeCUE, its newsletter.

Getting members was a problem since I seem to be the only Commodore owner in Kuantan then. It was solved by The Star's In-Tech. Davin Arul, the In-Tech's Editor then, reviewed BarbeCUE and plugged the club. We got our members (including the famous blogger TV Smith).

Davin (last I heard, he was VP of I.Star Sdn Bhd) continued his support for CUE in In-Tech and by wrangling a free booth for us in the first few Microfest (later incorporated into e-World). I also remember Davin being the guinea pig for one of our video grabbing projects. Davin is a big person and he has a bigger heart. I hope to run into him in one of the Japanese restaurants again. Other strong supporters were Kenny Madrigal of Syscom and Leong of Visioncom (later Vicom).

The strength of CUE was of course the members. The President Kamaruzaman, David Chan, Ronald Lim, Sinex (Ng Lid Sin), Jeffery and many others worked very hard to make CUE meaningful and fun. A few even came down to Kuantan and camped in my office to help with the newsletter. The monthly newsletter was printed on a dot-matrix printer and then pasted on masters and printed on an offset machine of a "friendly" government department. We didn't have PageMaker® or InDesign© back then but we did have a word processing program from Canada that can do decent layouts. Anyone can remember the name?

We didn't have Internet yet then but we did manage to catch TELITA (a teletext service with chunky graphics) and had fun chatting with Yasmin Yussof at one time.

CUE died a natural death when Commodore folded under the onslaught of IBM© clones. It still brings back fond memories. If you know of any CUE members, please let them contact me. We want to give CUE a proper burial.

(Brand names copyrighted by their respective owners and used without as much a by your leave)
| 12:11 AM :: ::
7 CommentsOldStyle:
  • Don't forget Soh Kam Yung and Pakku too! I don't know (or harbor any hope) if you remember me at all but I was once CUE's youngest member at 9 years of age. I wrote in BarbeCUE a few times alongside SKY as The Junior Rambler when I was 12. I remember having our own share of fun giving the editor a bit of a headache editing our lengthy rambling columns! I also still remember those seemingly endless nights keying in hex codes off Compute!'s Gazette just so that I can use SpeedScript on my C64 to join in the fun of writing to/for BarbeCUE! Then Sinex taught me 6510 assembly, David taught me Music Processor, etc. etc. Egad! It's so good to finally hear from you, Tengku! If there's ever a talk of getting the old lot together, do keep me in the loop! I wouldn't miss it for the world!

    -- redzuan a.k.a. dJ phuturecybersonique

    By Blogger dJ phuturecybersonique, at 1:42 AM  
  • Thanks Redzuan! How can Pok Ku forgot Soh Kam Yong, the llama lover from Kuala Kangsar. The last time I heard from him, he was in Singapore. Kam Yong was among the members who came down to Kuantan to help.
    I will surely let you know when we have our reunion.

    By Blogger Bustaman, at 8:06 AM  
  • Hehehe... that was a little before my time la Pok Ku. Unfortunately, my parents could only afford a computer for us kids during the zaman Pentium II! Anything before that is a mystery to me!

    By Blogger DaisyBoo Blacksheep, at 10:21 AM  
  • Commodore, reminds me of that group 'The Commodores'. I was in Form 1 when I learn computers and its binary codes of 0101010110101.... and few years later we heard abt 'Commodore'. Fond memories you bring back, Pok Ku. ;-)

    By Blogger Honeytar, at 12:26 AM  
  • hehehe..the only early machine which I know is IBM. Or maybe Apple Macintosh II kot. But I did hear about Amiga..

    By Blogger alang, at 8:06 PM  
  • I still have a "working" Amiga 1200. I nearly trashed it early this year when I shifted home but decided against it. I did trash all the diskettes though.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 1:54 PM  
  • Yes, I was also a proud recipent of the Barbecue newsletter and the picture that you are showing is the original Amiga 1000. Most of us had the Amiga 500 then - which was sold at about RM2200 then with 512KB RAM. At the time, one of the shops that supported the Commodore was Vicom - which is still in operations and has grown tremendously and has expanded to handphones as well.

    I was one of the teens then that was reviewing Amiga games for Computimes in 1988-1989

    It was a fun time - even if there was no public internet then.

    Regards
    Eric See-To

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 9:36 AM  
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