On the 1st January 1986, my cousin and I founded the „Blue Danube Atari Club“ („BDAC“), that is 30 years today. Well time flies …

Our club was probably one of the very first user computer clubs in Austria. It featured the 8-bit home computers as well as the 2600, 5200 and 7800 game systems, and soon also the ST computers. It was a small club with around 50 members at its peak. Great times!

The picture shows the cover of the very first club magazine. The cover „art“ was hand drawn by me, the content was written on a mechanical typewriter. The magazine was then photocopied for the members. Later (I had no printer in the beginning) it was made on my 130 XE and printed out. Imagine printing out dozens of copies, each with 16 or 20 pages, on a Seikosha GP-100AT seven-pin matrix dot printer. Eventually it was converted into a disk magazine, I wrote the software for the 8-bit and 16-bit computers by myself, both versions featuring 80 columns on the screen.

In the early 1990s the PCs took over and computers were no longer a hobby, but business, which I absolutely didn’t like. To compensate that, I renamed the club to „Play Atari Club“ („PAC“), featuring only games for all the above mentioned systems, plus Lynx and Jaguar. When I got my first internet access in spring 1997, the club was closed and continued as a free website, named „Classic Consoles Center“ („CCC“) …