Marek Tomczyk
A major backbone of ABBUC are its Regional Groups. There are quite a few of them in Germany. They often provide opportunities for meetings, programming and offer help when problems occur. Besides this, the club offers consultants on a wide variety of topics like word processing, Assembler programming, memory upgrades, EPROM-burning, XEP-80 questions and others.
Four times a year every member receives a printed magazine (edited in German) containing articles submitted by the community. Each magazine is accompanied by a disk featuring additional articles and programs. Additionally there's also a "Sondermagazin" twice a year which deals with a single specific topic and often provides a commercial quality piece of software. This software usually has been especially licensed by ABBUC and therefore supports the few 8-bit programmers that are still around.
All these activities wouldn't be possible without this great number of people associated with the club. The sheer number of members still provides a solid financial background for the near future. ABBUC derives its income mainly from membership fees, but also gets additional donations from companies and individuals. This is possible because of the club's special status: it's an "e.V." which means that it's a "registered association". This German form of corporation allows you to reduce your income tax if you donate something to it (donate to the assocaiation, not to the tax, of course :) ).
The membership fee is 5 DeutschMarks (2.56 Euros) per month.
For a free information-kit write to the address below. Note: all information will be in German so you'll need either to understand this language or have someone handy who can translate it to you.