The (former) Regio Cologne was founded at january 1992 by Frank Fleischer and me , after we found out on the yearly meeting of the GUC at 1991, that there have been more GEOS-enthusiasts at the Cologne region.

The first meetings took place at the former diskotheque owned by Frank, until april 1992, when we found our new meeting-place at the pub "Gertrudenhof" in Cologne-Ehrenfeld .

Our journal - the GEOS-Kurier - was published the first time at summer 1992 in cooperation with the Regio Aachen. It was layouted with GEOS 64/128 and GeoPublish and then printed on a laserprinter (meanwhile without the Regio Aachen). Nowadays, where we know the plus of geoWrite (PC/Geos), we do the layout with geoWorks ensemble.

The first meetings were big mass-copy-meetings, so we decided to make our own PD-library and to organize the meeting in another way.
Nowadays, at the beginning, we talk around 1 hour about the news from other groups, about new soft- and hardware, and we talk about problems, so that one will get in contact with the other members. After that we will find our way to the computers (min. 1x C64/128 and 1x PC), on which we show new programs, do workshops and get in touch with problems. The mass-copies will now be done on private home-meetings !

At spring 1993 the GUC decided to redefine their statutes. They made the rule, that everyone, who joins a Regio-meeting had to be a GUC-member. So we decided to dissolve the Regio Cologne of the GUC and to found the V(ereinigten) G(eos) A(nwender) Cologne (United Geos Users). We did that, because the most of our active meeting-members were no members of the GUC.

We have contacs to programmers all over the world, to Regios and GEOS-groups at Germany and other countries and - together with the GIG South - we try to organize alternative GEOS-meetings, on which ALL GEOS-users are welcome.
We organize barbeque-parties and a Xmas-party, to strengthen the personal contacts between our members. We have our PD-libraries for GEOS 64/128 and PC and we have created our own graphics-library (around 50 GEOS-disks).

The members:

around 20% below 25 years of age, 40% 25-50 years and 40% over 50 years
around 80% Geos 64/128, 20% PC/Geos
We have specialists for all GEOS-topics, hardware-freaks, programmers and we do a printer-ribbon recycle-service.

At the meetings, which take place every 4th saturday of a month, there are around 10-20 persons from Cologne and neighborhood, Duesseldorf, Essen and Duisburg. Sometimes some programmers (i.e. Erwin Schnabel - RAM-Tools, Burkhard Weihrauch - label programs ...) join our meetings. We have been on some computer-fairs with our infobox and we are very active in telecommunications.