Myself, and at least several other folks are rather to quite interested in reconstruction much of BALUG's history (and getting much of it online). Though it may be a rather slow-moving project, I have made much progress on that - pulled lots of stuff from various sources, etc. ... there's still also a fair bit of data to be recovered from a moderately misconfigured setup ... anyway, more on that later ... there probably will be some gaps which may be difficult to well or completely fill, but much of the material should eventually be reconstructed pretty well.
For one peek at a hint of possible things to come, have a peek at: http://www.test.balug.org/mpaoli/past/ Do note the above is a DRAFT (that's more evident if one starts at: http://www.test.balug.org/mpaoli/ )
A fair bit of this was covered on the "admin" list before ... but quite a while back (probably over a year since the topic was discussed much and/or I provided an update on status/progress).
Anyway, more a bit later, in separate posting.
Quoting "Mike Higashi" mhigashi@gmail.com:
On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 11:08 AM, Rick Moen rick@linuxmafia.com wrote:
[1] Earliest reference I can find is Nov. 1996. Elsewhere (http://lists.balug.org/pipermail/balug-admin-balug.org/2005-September/000078...), I've posted that Sifry and Tyde founded the group in 1997. I seem to been off by a year -- but that's the sort of thing that happens when a group obliterates its own history.
I found a Usenet archive of a posting to comp.os.linux.misc from July, 1997 that announce the 1 year anniversary meeting, so 1996 would be correct.
For look back at previous versions of the BALUG web site from the Internet Archive:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.balug.org
For a snapshot of the original mail list, as of April, 1999:
http://web.archive.org/web/19990203040039/balug.org/resMail.html
The next snapshot after that was taken by the Internet Archive in October of 1999, which was after the new site design had wiped out the original one.
For an incomplete list of some early speakers:
http://web.archive.org/web/19990202183446/balug.org/meetOld.html