It was January 20, 1985.  Ronald Reagan was being sworn in on his second term as President of the United States.  It was the coldest inauguration in U.S. Presidential history with a bright blue sky in Washington DC and a wind chill of -20 degrees Fahrenheit.  Due to the cold, the inauguration was moved indoors to the grand foyer of the White House.  At the same time that Reagan was taking oath in Washington, Milwaukee Wisconsin had a low temperature of -16. The peak temperature reached -7 that day.  While watching the inauguration I was thinking about the state of the IT industry in Milwaukee.  I was due to attend the Milwaukee MVS users group meeting at the Boulevard Inn soon and discuss the fact that IBM had reduced the level of support for our mainframe systems and that getting a good systems engineer on site was getting more difficult.   I was looking forward to discussing this with technical support managers from other local companies while at the restaurant bar and was anticipating what to recommend to solve the problem.  After all, drinking and whining go well together but I really didn’t want to whine more than once that winter so I thought a recommended solution would go well with my drink.

The discussion on what to do took most of the year to evolve and finally came to fruition in late 1985, yet a full winter later than when the complaining started.  Ultimately I had many discussions with many local technical support managers, sysprogs, systems engineers and other IT folks with active brain cells. It was the following winter when I spent a night in the business section of the Milwaukee Public Library looking up company names that the name NaSPA was invented.  At the time, NaSPA stood for “National Systems Programmers Association” and in its initial incarnation NaSPA was for IBM (and compatible) mainframe systems running MVS, VM and VSE.  As time went on many services were invented and implemented.  Some of those services were a first in the industry.  NaSPA was one of the first handful of organizations in the United States to run a computer bulletin board system (BBS).  It was named NaSCOM and ultimately grew to 72 dial in phone lines with 56k modems and internet access.  Our first web server grew from that BBS system and was ultimately replaced by a web server, mail server and domain name server.

NaSPA was also among the first organizations to run with Novell and a multi-user relational database.  We would back up the database daily on diskette (100 of them) until PC tape drives were invented (and we could afford them).  They were interesting times at the PC level of automation for a staff that had come out of the mainframe environment.  I remember one time where all of our PC’s (NaSCOM, Novell, etc) were stacked in a very large wooden shelf unit and we came in on a Monday morning and smelled something that we shouldn’t have smelled.  Upon investigation, I found a 10bT hub on top of the wooden shelf unit with the PC’s in it and all four rubber feet were melted into a rubber puddle.  The wood was so hot from an overheated monitor immediately below it that we just turned off the circuit breaker without shutting anything down and hoped everything would cool off before a fire started.  None did, fortunately.

On April 29, 1992, NaSPA held its NaSTEC conference in Los Angeles, California at the Biltmore Hotel.  Unfortunately, while we were there enjoying the benefits of technical training and member camaraderie, the LA riots were happening across the street from the hotel and everyone was locked in the hotel for the duration.  Just in case you don’t remember that particular event, the name Rodney King and “can’t we just all get along” gained 15 minutes of fame that week.

Many good and interesting times have been had over the 20 years of NaSPA’s existence and I could write a novel on the topic that would be very interesting.  Our new President, Radi Shourbaji gave me 300 words and I’m already at 838 so I can’t go on any longer.  However, next time you see me buy me a drink and I’ll tell you lots more!  Like the time we had a NaSTEC in Dallas and I was sleeping on the top floor of the hotel.  Directly above us on the roof was the hot tub.  Then Denver, Colorado chapter President Emit Hurdelbrink thought the hot tub was too hot so he started transferring cool water from the swimming pool to the hot tub in an effort to cool the hot tub down.  Unbeknownst to him (so he says!)  is that water began to flow over the sides of the hot tub through the roof and into the ceiling over my bed, which resulted in the ceiling falling into my bed in the middle of the night.  It was a gooey, steamy, plastery mess!  I got even though and promoted him to board chairman! 

Scott Sherer

Founder