A fact from Toronto PET Users Group appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 19 January 2015 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:
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Was the COMAL mentioned in the article the programming language? Did it have a special environment or just consist of a compiler or interperter? As mentioned in the article, it's being compared to CP/M (an operating system) and GEOS. (I'm not sure what kind of environment this was, but it doesn't seem to be mentioned on the GEOS disambiguation page - the earliest software there seems to be for the Commodore 64.)Autarch (talk) 17:11, 5 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
@Autarch: Yes, COMAL is the programming language, and its various Commodore 64 implementations, including the official one from Commodore, featured a full development environment and user interface (similar to LOGO and to the machine's native BASIC). You can see screenshots with some judicious searching of Google Images. —Psychonaut (talk) 00:16, 29 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
The reliable sources used for this article disagree as to whether TPUG was founded in 1978 or 1979. I was recently in communication with Karl Hildon of The Transactor who says that he attended the very first meeting of Duggan's group about two to three months after being hired by Commodore in early September 1978. This makes a founding date of 1978 more likely. Of course, my personal communication is original research, but since we've got to pick a year for the establishment category, I suppose it's better to go with 1978. I'll leave the article text as stating that the founding was in "1978 or 1979". —Psychonaut (talk) 20:43, 7 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
@Psychonaut: Sometimes NOR gets in the way (like here) but just to be on the safe side it'd be good to see if Karl could write up a blog post or something somewhere that would express that along with some other details of the early days of TPUG, just to be safe. We could then cite that post, reducing the OR issue at least somewhat. Think he'd be willing to do that? // coldacid (talk|contrib) 01:11, 8 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
He doesn't have a blog as far as I know, but I'll get in touch with him again and see if there's any possibility of getting his recollection published somewhere reliable. Lyman Duggan is still around (and IIRC even edited this article at one point) so perhaps I can get him to do the same. Probably the most realistic option would be to get TPUG to publish both accounts in its own newsletter—this would make it a primary source, but since the claims aren't unduly self-serving (i.e., they're being used only to resolve a minor dating issue) they'd be admissible under WP:RS. Of course, it might be a few months before anything could be published. —Psychonaut (talk) 12:03, 8 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
