ANAHEIM, CALIF. - Twice a year the Button Man dons his lab coat, weighted down with pins, for a singalong with a few hundred other crooners who share a common affinity for IBM technology.

The biannual singalong is held on the Thursday night before the closing sessions of each Share conference. The buttons are a tradition not quite as old as the nonprofit Share organization itself, whose members convened last week in Anaheim and which this year celebrates its 50th anniversary as an educational and networking forum for users of IBM technology.

The first Share button surfaced in 1965 with the appeal "Stamp out green words." It was a reference to an IBM presentation made a year earlier - in which the speaker chose to use green chalk - describing a new block tape format for FORTRAN. Users objected to the fact that only the FORTRAN language could read the unformatted records, now known as VBS, and there were no provisions for other languages such as Assembler or COBOL, says Barry Merrill, aka the Button Man.

"It wasn't so much anti-VBS, but a plea to IBM to make these records available to all languages, not just one," Merrill says.

That first button started what became a longstanding Share tradition of lobbying IBM via buttons that attendees conceived and produced on their own dimes. The early buttons were noncommercial, sometimes in praise of a product that an individual liked, sometimes attacking a product people didn't like, Merrill says. "They were almost always humorous. Occasionally they were a little bit scurrilous or scatological, and there were a few sexual references," he says.

Merrill started collecting Share buttons in 1975 and today has 1,170. Of all the buttons produced, he estimates he might be missing a few dozen at most. The collection has grown over the years thanks to a lot of contributions - some particularly memorable, Merrill says. "This one box shows up in the mail and there's a little note from someone saying 'In view of my impending marriage and my agreement with my wife to shed half of my stuff while she sheds half of her crap, here is my button collection to add to yours,'" he adds.

Today, the buttons are artifacts, having faded from prominence in the 1990s as excessiveness began to dilute the messages. "It became overcommercialized in the 1990s, as much of the world did," Merrill says.

But he still breaks out his now infamous lab coat for each Share conference he attends. And there have been many. Merrill attended his first meeting in 1974 and has since attended about 50 of the biannual events, first as a user and later as a vendor. "I don't think I've missed more than a dozen meetings," says Merrill, who today runs his own firm, Merrill Consultants.

Peer power

Share got its start in 1955 when a handful of pioneering IT professionals got together, just two years after the release of IBM's first computer, to prepare for running the systems. In the early years, stringent membership requirements allowed only mainframe shops to join the group and attend the biannual meetings. While membership requirements have been loosened over the years, the spirit of the organization remains the same, longtime participants say.

"The best part of Share is the opportunity to talk to people who have the same problems you have and learn how they solved them," says Robert Rosen, current president of Share and a CIO within the federal government's National Institutes of Health. Rosen attended his first Share meeting in 1970 and has been coming ever since.

User presentations are the most valuable part of Share, says Carl Youngren, a former assistant director of the information systems division in the state of California's Department of Health and Human Services' data center. "Any vendor will give me a pitch on his product in a moment's notice. But what you can't get is somebody standing up saying, 'Hey, I put this thing in my shop and this is what worked and this is what didn't work.' That's the most valuable part of Share," Youngren says.

He's among the attendees willing to talk about how stuff works. Youngren, who retired at the end of last year but returned to his old job on a part-time basis a few months later, attended his first Share meeting in 1980. Since 1991, he and partner Bob Shannon of Rocket Software have delivered one of the most popular sessions.

It's called Bit Bucket, and it started out as filler for a slot in the schedule that no one else wanted to fill: the last session on Friday, Share's closing day. In Bit Bucket, Youngren and Shannon talk about myriad topics, most related to IBM's MVS mainframe operating system. Instead of a formal session on a specific topic, it's a series of tips, warnings, anecdotes and whatever else the pair comes up with.

"It's just a couple of users talking about things that happened in the last six months - what bit us, what might bite you," Youngren says. "If you don't like what we're talking about, wait 5 minutes and we'll be on another topic."

Youngren made getting to Share a priority throughout his career, which wasn't always easy as a budget-strapped state employee. He and his colleagues learned to justify their trips to Share over the years by carefully documenting instances in which they saved money as a result of tips or techniques learned at the meetings.

For example, at one conference Youngren learned about a problem with Computer Associates' IDMS database that another Share attendee had experienced. By making a small fix to the IDMS code, he averted the problem before it affected his data center, saving $2.5 million a year. "We're at over $10 million worth of savings on things that we picked up at Share," Youngren says.