Today in 1955, representatives from seventeen organizations that had ordered the IBM 704 mainframe computer met at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California.
The outcome of the meeting was the first computer users group, SHARE—“It’s not an acronym, it’s what we do.” The group grew with the rapid expansion of the mainframe market, eventually producing new software and documentation for IBM computers.
Today, SHARE has (still) a membership list of more than 1,000 companies with more than 13,000 individual contacts.