🚀 go-pugleaf

At the MUS business meeting which was held at the national meeting in May, 
the membership unamimously voted to merge MUS with Interchange. I admit that 
am remiss in not following up on my requst to have someone else post a summary
of the meeting. (mea culpa)

There will  be a summary in the forthcomming Musings.

In esense, the merger (of MUS and Interchange) will:

1) Incorporate MUS members (who are currently paid up) into Interchange with 
all the rights and privledges etc. (Including a BBS system with an 800 number 
which you are encouraged to login to and use.) We have convinced
Interchange to allow single person memberships for $50 per year. Previously,
they only had 4 person group memberships for $150/yr. The group rate is still 
available, and is a better deal if you have several people.

2) Allow us two temporary positions on the Executive Committee, one for two 
years, and one for one year. At the MUS meeting, Jim Schultz was elected to 
the two year position, and I (Dale Chayes) was elected to the one year position.
(In fact, Jim and I attended a two day meeting of the Interchange excom in
Tinton Falls earlier this week.)

3) Create two new Special Interest Groups, Data Acq and RTU. Gary Cook (of Marathon
Oil) was elected (at the MUS meeting) as SIG chair for Data Acq and I (Dale
Chayes) was elected to the RTU SIG Chair. 

4) Give us the oportunity to have an RTU oriented person as the next chair of the
Graphics Sig. Larry Rogers (of Defence Engineering Systems) was elected by
MUS to take up the Graphics SIG chair begining at the Interchange meeting in
October.

The Interchange annual meeting is at the Hotel Royal Plaza, Walt Disney
World, Village in Lake Buena Vista, Florida on October 16-20.  There are a
number of RTU related sessions scheduled as well as SIG group sessions which
will be of interest to us, so I encourage you to consider attending.

I think that one of the fundamental advantages of the merger off the user
groups is that it allies us with a group large enough so that there are
enough active volunteers to plan meetings, deal with the triva, AND have
active SIGS, but only if you contribute too, so pick up the phone (or the
modem and go!)

I would like to point out that we had a much higher percentage of registered
members show up at the business meeting (~55%) than has been the norm in the
few years that I have been a MUS member. I assume that this was because of
the gravity of the decisions to be taken.

There will be one more issue of Musings going to press shortly with more
details.
 
If you are a paid up memeber, you should have received your first copy of 
the Interchange newsletter recently. Its depth and quality are
representative of my experiences with Interchange thus far. However, there is
very little about kind of hardware and software that we use. The only way to
remedy that is for YOU to contribute. The interesting action in Interchange is
in the SIGS, so please get in touch with one or more of the SIG chairs and
contribute. As the Interchange folks often say  ;
	
	... the dialog is the group
 
The administrator and general contact person for Interchange is Patty
Brown who can be reached at (201) 758-7575. Please call her for
administrative details. Give her a call and get a BBS account established.


Your representatives to Interchange are:

	Jim Schultz (205) 544-2937 	Executive committee and library
	Garry Cook (303) 794-2601	Data Acq sig
	Larry Rogers (401) 847-7868	Graphics
	Dale Chayes (914) 359-2900	Executive committee and RTU-SIG	


In summary, I think that it is appropriate to change the name of
comp.sys.masscomp to comp.sys.concurrent. 

[ I appologize as well. Somehow this article sit in the inqueue for a
long time before it was posted. -- sob]
Articles to: masscomp@soma.bcm.tmc.edu or uunet!soma.bcm.tmc.edu!masscomp
Administrative stuff: masscomp-request@soma.bcm.tmc.edu
Stan Barber, Moderator