About Us

The following was written by Steven Pritchard:

The Southern Illinois Linux Users Group began in September of 1994 in Carbondale, Illinois with the following announcement:

Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.announce
From: spritcha@nyx10.cs.du.edu (Steven Pritchard)
Subject: LOCAL: Linux Users Group in S. Illinois
Message-ID: <ann-16702.779472095@cs.cornell.edu>
Date: Tue, 13 Sep 1994 16:01:57 GMT
Approved: linux-announce@tc.cornell.edu (Matt Welsh)
There will be an informational meeting for a new Linux Users Group in
Carbondale, IL at Three Course Computers (828 E. Main Street) on Monday,
Sept. 19 at 6 pm.  We will be discussing the content of the regular
meetings and when those meetings will be (presently, they will be the
first an third Mondays of the next couple of months).
We need as many people as possible to show up to discuss what everyone
wants.  The meetings will be free, so you’ve got nothing to lose and a
lot to gain!  Everyone is welcome!
For more information, contact me at one of the addresses below, or call
Three Course Computers at 618-xxx-xxxx.
I look forward to seeing you there!
Steve
spritcha@nyx10.cs.du.edu             |  Steven
sjpritch@siucvmb.siu.edu             |  Pritchard
GCS/M/S d? p+ c++(++++) l++ u+(-) e+ m+(—) s/+ !n h— f+ g+ w@ t++ r- y?
–
Send submissions for comp.os.linux.announce to: linux-announce@tc.cornell.edu
Be sure to include Keywords: and a short description of your software.

(Note that all email addresses and business names above no longer exist. The phone number was edited to protect the innocent.)

I led the group until 1997, when I moved to Springfield, Illinois, where I started the Linux Users of Central Illinois. (Of course, that’s another story entirely.) After I left, Matthew Walker, Mark Bishop, then Rich Fifarek led the group. Conveniently, when Rich moved away in June of 2000, I’d moved back within driving distance of Carbondale, so I took over the meetings there again.

Completely independently, another group started up at Scott Air Force Base, near O’Fallon, Illinois (which is near St. Louis, Missouri) sometime in 1994 or 1995. The group later moved to Fairview Heights, Illinois, and it was renamed to the Missouri Valley LUG. The group decided to share resources with SILUG in mid-2000, as well as take on the name.

So currently (I’m writing this 9/30/2000) SILUG has monthly meetings in both Carbondale and Fairview Heights. If all goes well, there will soon be monthly meetings in other towns around Southern Illinois, so stay tuned.

The Credits

This site was inspired by various web sites, including (but not limited to) LUCI, Slashdot, Freshmeat, The Linux Portaloo, and tigert’s site.

From the 1990s until 2026, the site was rendered dynamically by Apache and mod_perl with a MySQL back end, on a Red Hat Linux server whose uptime eventually became more impressive than advisable. It is now built with Hugo into plain static files — same look, a lot less moving parts — and served from a small Kubernetes cluster.

Concept/Perl Programming
Steven Pritchard

Web Design/Graphics
Dav Glass