A.A. History—month & day unknown

1992: At the World Service Meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous in New York City, several delegates in attendance engaged in informal discussions about the 1978 proposal for an Asia‑Oceania Service Meeting (AOSM). These discussions were part of a series that would ultimately result in the establishment of the first AOSM meeting in Tokyo, Japan, in 1995.

1992: Thirteen one-hour Alcoholics Anonymous meetings were broadcast multiple times each week on cable television in Portland, Oregon.

1993: The “Reducing Alcoholism Project” was initiated in Mongolia under the leadership of L. Erdenebayar [right (?)], an esteemed physician, professor, and academician. As a result of this work, the concept of Alcoholics Anonymous was introduced to the country.

1995: The General Service Office (GSO) in New York City introduced a software program called DelArea for General Service Areas, allowing them to access group records, including contributions, and eliminating the need for paper reporting.

Previously, updating and sharing group information was a lengthy process that relied heavily on paper. By the time GSO received and recorded the material, it was often outdated and inaccurate. Meanwhile, the stacks of paper continued to grow, leading to increased mailing costs.

However, there were challenges. As Lillianna Murphy [left: at work on A.A. IBM AS/400 computer, 1991], the nonalcoholic director of GSO’s information services, noted at the time:

It worked to an extent, but there was kind of a catch-22: it soon became apparent that for some areas it was the only database application they were using. The program was written in software called dBaseIV because the company allowed us to distribute it without paying a licensing fee for each area. However, as dBaseIV developed into later versions, the software could not be updated because the next version was too large for most of the area computers to handle.

[Increasingly,] the areas were acquiring much better equipment, there were far more record keepers conversant with PCs, and many users had taken the DelArea data and imported it into programs they’d written themselves—frequently in Microsoft Access. The major drawback has been that as each set of data is distributed, it overlays all the other data in the application.

To address the problems, GSO investi­gated new software on the market and sent each area a questionnaire asking about the type of hardware in use and whether Microsoft Access would be an acceptable data percent of respondents used Microsoft Windows and were comfortable with it [right: Gemini-generated summary of differences be- tween dBase IV and Access].

Still, it would be several years before any further action took place.