The Hobby Computer Club (HCC) is a Dutch computer club, now based in Haarlem, the Netherlands which was established on April 27, 1977 by a small group of people who lived near the town of Leyden and which grew to become a nationally significant club of over 200,000 members in 2003. The HCC was inspired by the Amateur Computer Club founded in 1973 by Mike Lord. Mike started with sending a letter to Wireless World. Dick Barnhoorn saw this and became a member of the ACC. After a few years he started the HCC in the Netherlands and Belgium (for Dutch/Flemish speakers), also by first sending letters to popular electronics and IT magazines. The initial logo of HCC was an adapted copy of Mike's logo for ACC.
The first HCC meeting was in a building of the Delft University of Technology, at that moment the HCC had 12 members.
A small stenciled (A5 size) newsletter was published bimonthly: HCCN (HCC Nieuwsbrief) similar to the ACCN (ACC Newsletter). After participating in a large event for technical hobbies in April 1978 membership increased from 200 to over >1000 within a month. Soon the HCC had branches in every part of the Netherlands, and through the years the HCC grew to more than 150,000 members. The small newsletter turned into a monthly computer magazine (Computer!Totaal) that still has an internal newsletter called hcc!link. The HCC now also offers a free Internet service to its members, as well as free technical assistance with computer problems.
For many years a big exhibition called the "HCC dagen" (HCC Days) was held in the Jaarbeurs in Utrecht with many hundreds of thousands of attendees. A tradition started in 1977, for showing off the member's activities and giving commercial parties an opportunity to demonstrate new products and sell equipment and software, was interrupted in 2010 because the commercial parties lost interest as internet was becoming their main sales platform. In 2011 HCC organised a similar event on a much smaller scale than before: HCC!digital
Famous quotes containing the words hobby, computer and/or club:
“My hobby more and more is likely to be common school education, or universal education.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“What, then, is the basic difference between today’s computer and an intelligent being? It is that the computer can be made to see but not to perceive. What matters here is not that the computer is without consciousness but that thus far it is incapable of the spontaneous grasp of pattern—a capacity essential to perception and intelligence.”
—Rudolf Arnheim (b. 1904)
“Of course we women gossip on occasion. But our appetite for it is not as avid as a man’s. It is in the boys’ gyms, the college fraternity houses, the club locker rooms, the paneled offices of business that gossip reaches its luxuriant flower.”
—Phyllis McGinley (1905–1978)