DECUS

The Digital Equipment Computer Users' Society (DECUS) was an independent computer user group related to Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC).

The Connect User Group Community, formed from the consolidation in May, 2008 of DECUS, Encompass, HP-Interex, and ITUG is the Hewlett-Packard’s largest user community representing more than 50,000 participants.

DECUS was the Digital Equipment Computer Users' Society, a users' group for Digital Equipment Corporation computers. Members included companies and organizations who purchased DEC equipment; many members were application programmers who wrote code for DEC machines or system programmers who managed DEC systems. DECUS was founded in March 1961 by Edward Fredkin.

DECUS was legally a part of Digital Equipment Corporation and subsidized by it; however, it was run by volunteers. Digital staff members were not eligible to join DECUS, yet were allowed and encouraged to participate in DECUS activities. Digital, in turn, relied on DECUS as an important channel of communication with its customers.

The DECUS U.S. Chapter conducted technical conferences at various locations, and ran other operations like Local User Groups (LUGs) and Special Interest Groups. Chapters in other nations did likewise. DECUS also promoted the open exchange of user-developed software, largely via magnetic tape.

DECUS played a critical role in the development of computer games in North America in the 1970s. The pioneering titles Adventure by Will Crowther; Baseball, Dungeon and Star Trek by Don Daglow and Hunt the Wumpus by Gregory Yob provided a foundation for the games industry. One of the first real-time interactive multi-user games, MTrek (MultiTrek), was also distributed on DECUS tapes. Major commercial game titles including Zork and Empire were first popularized by DECUS.

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