NZ Amiga Users Group

The earliest evidence we have on this group is December 1989, by which time it already had branches in Wellington, run by Tony Wills of Lyall Bay, and Auckland, run by Roger Manson of Glenfield. The first newsdisk was an explicit departure from the printed newsletter the group had already been publishing: Tony Wills framed it as a new medium for timely information, member contributions, and content that didn't suit paper. By September 1989, documented in the newsletter on disk 26, the network had expanded to formal user groups in Dunedin, Christchurch, Nelson, Westland, Palmerston North, Wanganui, Hawke's Bay, New Plymouth, Hamilton, Tauranga, and Auckland, plus individual contacts in dozens of smaller towns.

That first disk included a Fred Fish catalogue covering disks 1 to 46, NZ hardware and software price lists, instructions for building a 1MB memory expansion board, disk recovery guides, and several utilities, including Ty, a text viewer Wills had written himself. Content matured considerably over the run, from early ray-traced graphics and Workbench tips through to hardware fault guides, C programming tutorials, product reviews, and a lively letters page. Members were explicitly encouraged to copy and share the newsletter and newsdisks freely.

The group also maintained a library of around 500 PD disks by 1989, available to members at cost of media and postage. Sadly this collection does not appeared to have survived - if you have access to it, please contact us.

The newsdisks were a genuine publication, paired with a printed newsletter, and the two together formed a complete picture - the editorial on disk 26 notes that members reading only the newsletter were "only seeing part of the whole." The last newsdisk in the series is dated February 1990, giving the series a documented run of just over three years.