The North Pittsburgh Macintosh Users Group started as an idea on the back of a napkin back in 1996. At the University of Pittsburgh , and more specifically, Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh Dave Sevick and Dave Wagner had lunch one day and mapped out the idea of an Apple User Group that would always make people feel comfortable, welcome and not ashamed or embarrassed to be new to the Mac or computers in general.
Before that time there was a very good group in downtown Pittsburgh called the Pittsburgh Apple Business Users Group, run by Frank Wyman. Frank and many of the attendees were specialists from the programming world and enjoyed extended conversations about codecs and ResEdit and Unix commands .....
This was great ! And those guys were on a roll with many high end arguments about esoteric computer issues .... But any new user trying to just learn about Macs avoided those types of “exclusive” meetings. Since our very first meeting on April 24, 1996 at the Northland Public Library we have stuck to our guns as being “inclusive” to all attendees.
We ask for a yearly $25 support donation to sponsor the web site, snacks and special projects.
In 1999 we moved our meetings to the newly built MacOufitters of Cranberry located on Route 19 North.
We draw about 15-50 per meeting and 100+ visitors on major Apple events like our famous OS X parties for 10.1, Jaguar 10.2, Panther 10.3 and Tiger 10.4 .... all at MacOutfitters. See the photo below taken at the recent Tiger party.
In addition to the many newcomers we have several Apple Consultants that attend meetings to offer support and just have a nice place to get together each month.
Dave Sevick is the spark .... and brings many others in to fan the flames ..... The leadership now is spread among many people as you will see below. Dave is a certified Apple Consultant and member of a team called the Apple Consultants Network.
Bob Donaldson ( you see him on the welcome page buried in a sea of computers ) is the man in charge of our donation center at the Center for Hope in Ambridge, PA. He has a passion for rehabilitating old computers. He is our OS9 expert and handles consulting duties for anything in “Classic” on back to OS8, System 7 and even System 6 .... If there were ever a die hard Apple fan ... it would be Bob.
Patrick Cranston is our new web designer as of 2006. He is a certified Apple Consultant, FileMaker Developer and colleague of Dave and the Apple team here in Pittsburgh.
Charles Firth runs the South Hills Village meetings. More on the South Hills page.
Jeff Szuhay and Les Getchell take turns running the Shadyside Apple Store meetings ... more here .
But .... I digress ..... :-)
Here are the meeting times for Cranberry Township NPMUG meetings ....
We meet the 1st Wednesday of each month, 7:00 - 9:00 PM ( check the calendar below )
You can view the PittsburghGroups calendar via any web browser at:
http://ical.mac.com/pittsburghgroups/PittsburghGroups
You can subscribe to the PittsburghGroups with iCal or any vEvent savvy calendar at:
webcal://ical.mac.com/pittsburghgroups/PittsburghGroups.ics
Tiger OS X Party at MacOutfitters April 29, 2005
L-R Mike Shepperd, Dave Sanchez, Dave Sevick, Joe Ribar
