The Micro Club: a Santa’s grotto for PC aficionados
This week, we push open the door of a club that has no fewer than 111 sections (that’s 7 for those who don’t know binary) and can rescue from your clapped-out old Atari all those important texts you thought you’d lost...
Sometimes the club gets the oddest of requests. In February 2008, it built a flight simulator using a still-rare 64-bit version of Microsoft Vista. Club members used this super-software to build a high-powered machine of great complexity. Here we see the project supervisor, Christer Ljuslin, making final tests.
The Barrack-567 premises of the Micro-club are living testament to the passion and drive of CERN’s computer fanatics. Neatly-arranged rows of brightly-coloured boxes here, gutted PC carcases and shrink-wrapped CPUs there; further on, randomly strewn computer parts mingle with the very tools that were used to dismantle them. The Micro-Computing Club, like CERN itself, is a hive of experts. Once, in the days when MACs were still incompatible with PCs, a member of the PC section, Gokhan Unel, famously "achieved the impossible" by installing the MAC TIGRE operating system on a PC the very evening it was released. The club’s MAC section, for its part, is the only certified centre in the whole of French-speaking Switzerland to provide training courses for professionals in Macintosh equipment and software. Club President, Federico Saldana, lets us in on the club’s secret: "Our great advantage is that we’re not a commercial enterprise - for computers built in the 1990s, we’re often the final throw of the dice." For example, the PC section leader, Louis Tremblet, has a version of Windows 3.11 from the late 80s that can always be reinstalled should the need arise.
The club’s PC-DIY aficionados salvage spare parts from their many contacts…but also from the bins! That’s how they managed to repair a web server for CHF 1000 (instead of buying one new for CHF 5500), using an out-of-service CPU box, second-hard parts and oodles of technical wizardry. Every year they re-build some thirty computers which are then shipped off to worthy educational causes in Africa.
When they’re not repairing computers (the MAC section is also a certified repair centre), they’re testing out new software versions (LINUX, VISTA or MAC), giving design-side input to the same, or sending out regular e-bulletins to the club members.
"But the club’s main aim is to train users and help them become self-sufficient, or even better, creative," notes Christian Baglin, head of the LINUX section. Indeed, browse the shelves of the club’s library and you’ll not only find the computer-buff’s "bibles" and dozens of specialised magazines but also all sorts of books for the novice. "We have a fun and friendly learning process," Christian Baglin explains. "Small working groups are set up to solve a given problem. Information is given and received in equal measure."
About once a month, one of the club’s seven sections organises the "Workshop of the Month". The workshop on Thursday 27th November, at 6.00 p.m., looks at how to transfer old vinyl records onto CDs, while December’s workshop gives an initiation into the video-editing suite Final-Cut-Pro.
For more information on the club’s activities:
