Author Archives: gotpapers

Honey/1001 Collection Pt. 4 – Letters from Mr. Z

We’re back from a long hiatus – with some spectacular material! In another instalment of scans from the archive of legendary Dutch C64 coder Honey of the 1001 Crew, we present you with letters that were written to him by a equally legendary scene protagonist: Mr. Z, the founder of the famous Swedish C64 cracking group Triad. Written throughout the year of 1987, these eight long letters are a treasure trove in various aspects. If you are a veteran cracker yourself, or simply someone who is interested in copy protection, you will enjoy reading a top cracker discussing protection methods and their circumvention – especially since in one of the later letters, Mr. Z offers to write the copy protection for Honey’s first commercial game. And this is another aspect of interest for those who are into home computing and scene history: Here, we can observe a generation of elite sceners making their first steps from the subculture into the industry – while still being basically schoolkids, discussing sophisticated code and their first business deals alongside the latest pranks and scene gossip. Finally, the letters document Mr. Z’s pullout from Triad and from the scene altogether – with school and “real life” taking hold over someone whose group was adored by tens of thousands computer kids worldwide.

Read these fascinating letters in the gallery below, or download the high quality scans complete with metadata sheets (which also document the scavenger hunt we had to undertake to provide date estimates for these almost completely undated documents) under the following links: April 1987 // April 1987 (2) // late May 1987 // late June 1987 // 30 July 1987 // August 1987 // September-October 1987 // November-December 1987

1980s Mail-Swapping Envelopes

We’re back with some materials that remind you of the materiality of “warez trading” in the 1980s. In these envelopes from The Movers‘ collection, floppy disks with the newest C64 and Amiga cracks and demos travelled around Europe between 1986 and 1988. Most people reused them and ultimately threw them away, but luckily these guys didn’t. There’s a whole box of them in our office now, and here’s just a small selection – featuring sendings from Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands and Switzerland. As usual, you can download the high quality scans and metadata from the archive, or view the pictures in the gallery below.

TMA’s Criminal Proceedings

Once again we are proud to present a few documents from a rare genre – criminal proceedings against scene members. This time, it’s German C64 scener TMA/Abyss Connection who supplied us with documents from the proceedings of the criminal case against him in 1990-1991.

In April 1990, the police had conducted a house search at another scener’s home (who apparently was a member of the Austrian group Lazer), where they found an address book containing TMA’s address. This resulted in a search warrant, which ordered the local police to confiscate from TMA’s home “disks; computers and [other] machines for the manufacturing and copying of disks, such as computers with disk drives, tape-to-tape recorders; counterfeit print materials, stickers, backup disks etc.; customers’ addresses, bank statements, word processing programs etc.” (p. 1-2). The wording was obviously made to match commercial piracy rather than hobbyist activism. The house search was conducted a few months later, resulting in about 200 disks, PLK cards and postal envelopes (but no address books) being confiscated (p. 3-4). Despite the seemingly vast evidence, the case, like so often, came to a halt: In May 1991, TMA’s parents were informed by the public prosecutor that the proceedings have been stopped “as [your son] has been warned enough through the consequences of his actions. I assume that in the future he will conduct himself orderly when it comes to the usage of computer programs, and ask you to undertake educational measures” (p. 5-6). After getting off so lightly, TMA even received one (!) disk back (p. 7-8).

You can view the scans in the gallery below, or download them from our archive here.

Thorion’s Disks

Today we present you with some more Amiga disks from the collection of Thorion a.k.a. Smily, a German Amiga swapper and graphics artist who was active in the late 1980s and the early 1990s and whose letters we featured here some months ago. Full of stickers and scribbles, they remind us about the materiality of data exchange in the era before the mass availability of the internet. You can download the high-quality scans in our archive, or browse the pictures below.

By the way, if anyone wants to talk to me about Got Papers?, hand over some materials etc., the Evoke demoparty in August in Cologne/Germany would be a good place to do so!