CACTUS is a group of mostly computer professionals and students. The purpose of the group is to educate and connect people interested in Unix and Open Systems related topics. We meet on the 3rd Thursday of every month at The Applied Research Labs of the University of Texas. The meeting begins at 6:30 with pizza and drinks and socializing. This is usually followed at 7:00 by a 30 minute tutorial on things like awk, mail, sed and the like. Following that we have a presentation on some topic. We try to mix technical and non-technical so we have had meetings about many different types of hardware (often presented by the vendor and many times with hands-on demos), policy and procedures, computer crimes, public domain mail readers, and various panels. The main presentations are about 1 to 1.5 hours. We try to wrap up by 9:30. The group is headed by a board of directors.
Membership is $25/yr. This covers the pizza, drinks, a monthly newsletter, and meeting related supplies.
Meetings are open to the public, at no charge. Feel free to come and "audit" one or two, if you like. We're very casual, though it may take some effort on your part to meet people. But if you can come some time, please introduce yourself to an officer.
Members may apply for an account on our machine, "cactus.org", a Sun Sparc II running Solaris 2.5. We allow free rein on the machine as long as it's not detrimental to others. We have Usenet NNTP feed and allow mail in and out. The machine is Internet connected and serves as WWW server. NOTE: We are not a timeshare service. Our machine is intended for use by persons interested in CACTUS. If you are simply looking for an account, please do not apply.
If you'd like to join, drop a note with your USPS address and we'll mail you an application. Our address is :
CACTUS PO Box 9786 Austin, TX 78766-9786
or send email to :
membership@cactus.orgOtherwise, you can pick one up at the meeting.