While the "hobby computer club culture" is known for introducing Steve Jobs to Woz, I suspect it enabled many thousands of similar life and industry changing personal collisions. It certainly did for me. In 1982 my teenage self started a local computer club for my 4K 8-bit Radio Shack Color Computer which I promoted by printing up flyers and driving around to a dozen Radio Shack stores and convincing the managers to post them near the computer. The first meeting was at my house with a dozen or so people but quickly outgrew that and moved to a local community center. I mostly started it because there was a lack of information that was specific to the computer I owned except for two hobby-level monthly 'zines (only available by subscription) and I didn't have any computer knowledge myself (or know anyone with a computer).
Fortunately, a fair number of people who came to the club knew more than I did about our computer and computers in general. I acquired much of my early computer knowledge from those people as well as getting my first two programming jobs through club contacts despite having no resume or computer-specific education. Eventually the club grew to several hundred people, became a registered non-profit corporation and had a volunteer board of directors (who were all older and more experienced than I was about, well - almost everything). I describe myself as a "self-taught programmer" but a good part of that was also being informally 'club-taught' because I had people to ask when I got stuck. They may not have always had the answer but hearing how they thought through solving it was also an education.
I can trace back my entire life-long career as an (eventually) successful serial entrepreneur in desktop computer-centric software and hardware to that club I naively started 45 years ago - and I still have five close friends I met at the club despite all of us moving across the country and around the world several times. And each of those friends has gone on to have notably interesting and productive computer-related careers too.
This happened a couple decades later, but my first FOUR tech jobs came from attending a local Linux user group and networking with the people there.
I was talking to someone and explaining that I was taking classes at a local community college in preparation for computer science degree and mentioned off-hand that I might try to find some part-time Linux/BSD sysadmin work at some point. (I never fully attained the degree but also ended up not needing it.) The owner of a local IT consulting business overheard me and called me up the next day. I worked for him for a while and the next three jobs I moved to after that were all based on referrals and recommendations from people in that group.
I am also a Radio Shack Color Computer alumni, owe my career to it. I started using OS-9 as soon as I could afford to upgrade to 64K RAM, to which I thank feeling right at home with SunOS after I got access to that in the university.
To anyone unfamiliar, which is probably most people, OS-9 was a multi-user multi-tasking operating system which ran on 6809 CPUs. While not a UNIX, it was similar enough that the transition to SunOS was smooth.
To this day, I still alias "ls -la" to "dire", which comes from my muscle memory of typing "dir -e" in OS-9!
Fortunately, a fair number of people who came to the club knew more than I did about our computer and computers in general. I acquired much of my early computer knowledge from those people as well as getting my first two programming jobs through club contacts despite having no resume or computer-specific education. Eventually the club grew to several hundred people, became a registered non-profit corporation and had a volunteer board of directors (who were all older and more experienced than I was about, well - almost everything). I describe myself as a "self-taught programmer" but a good part of that was also being informally 'club-taught' because I had people to ask when I got stuck. They may not have always had the answer but hearing how they thought through solving it was also an education.
I can trace back my entire life-long career as an (eventually) successful serial entrepreneur in desktop computer-centric software and hardware to that club I naively started 45 years ago - and I still have five close friends I met at the club despite all of us moving across the country and around the world several times. And each of those friends has gone on to have notably interesting and productive computer-related careers too.