Meetings

The meetings are free and open to the public. We meet almost every month as topics and interest and schedules demand. For a long time, we met on the third Monday of most months but are now meeting on the third Wednesday of every month. Our meeting location has changed a few times, but we have landed a good place on the south side of the Portland metro area that promises to be our new permanent location. We also sometimes meet online if we have a remote speaker or if we want to host the topic for a wider audience. However, always check the location in the email announcement or on the web site for each meeting to find out what is happening each month.

Feel free to join the low-volume mailing list to be notified of meetings and participate in occasional developer discussions. We look forward to meeting new people and sharing programming experiences!

Email List

To be notified about when and where our meetings will be and to participate in the low-volume discussions that occasionally arise, please join our email list hosted at groups.io. It’s totally free and you never get any solicitations to pay for anything nor do you need to watch any ads. Just follow the link below to the Groups.io site then click the “Apply for Membership” button:

History

When Borland came out with Delphi 1 in 1995, a new world opened up to Pascal programmers–Windows programming was now easily within their reach. Sure, there had been Borland Pascal 8 for Windows, but not too many people wanted to tackle the OWL (Object Windows Library) with all its C-like complexity and steep learning curve. With Delphi, many of the necessary details of Windows programming were hidden in “wrappers” or components that could be simply chosen from a palette and dropped on a form.

Soon, books and magazines started teaching Delphi programming and in Portland, Oregon, like many areas around the country (indeed, around the world!), developers wanted to get together and talk about this new programming environment, to strengthen their skills, learn new techniques, and build professional relationships. So, sometime near the end of 1995, a few of these people got together and started meeting on a monthly basis in Legacy Emanuel Hospital’s Lorenzen Center Auditorium. There was no one really “in charge” at first, just a group getting together and talking about Delphi.

But the meeting room definitely had a stage and we wanted someone up front! Soon Greg Postlewait stepped forward to lead. Greg’s professionalism and ability to bring good topics and speakers to the meetings, grew attendance rapidly. We setup an email list at eGroups–which was merged into Yahoo! Groups and is now on Groups.io. Since we were able to get the meeting room for no charge and the mailing list was free, we have never charged for admission or annual dues. After four years, Greg moved out of the area and handed the reins over to David Cornelius, who is the group’s coordinator to this day.

The group almost closed down in 2010 when David took an out-of-state job and made plans to move. But a year later, after working remotely and traveling a lot, he decided to stay in the Portland area. No one else had come forward to take over, so he resumed the leadership role.

At some point along the way, a web site had been established, but since there was no budget, it moved a couple of times depending on who would host it for free. In late 2000, David Cornelius arranged with John Kaster of Borland to host the group’s web site on Borland’s “Homepages” server. After several years, the server started showing its age and with the separation of the Developer Tools Group from Borland into Embarcadero’s CodeGear division, it didn’t even really fit there any more. So in early 2009, the domain name odug.org was established and a new web site was built. It is currently hosted by Cornelius Concepts, LLC and has gone through a few revisions, including WebBroker-generated HTML, Drupal, and now (as of January 2024), built with Hugo (the Markdown content and Pascal-like theme for the site are publicly available on Github and published using Github Actions).