Monthly Archives: July 2015

Amiga Swap Disks

The sheer amount of C64 disk covers presented here might give one the impression that only the C64 scene made an effort to decorate their data carriers. This would be a wrong impression, of course. The Amiga scene mailswapped floppy disks just the same, and made sure the recipients of the fresh wares were aware where the disks came from. However, since 3,5″ floppy disks were not floppy at all, and, most importantly, featured a shutter, Amiga users did not have to stick them into custom-made paper envelopes anymore. Instead, swappers (that is, the people whose job was to distribute the fresh releases by post as quickly as possible) decorated their disks with stickers, rubber stamps, and signatures. And since the 3,5″ disks were much more robust than their 5,25″ predecessors on the C64, they had a longer life span and could be circulated for a long time – accumulating countless stickers and scribblings until there was no space left on the casing.

While digitising some Amiga disks from Ziphoid‘s collection, Menace stumbled upon two interesting (and comparably pristine) disks he would like to share with us. First of all, there is a virgin disk with a custom-tailored sticker label from the legendary C64 and Amiga group Dual Crew, done by their Swedish swapper Snuskis in 1992 and sporting the group’s motto: [link] The other disk has been in circulation for a bit longer, carrying a rubber stamp from the none less legendary group Fairlight, and a sticker from another Swedish swapper and BBS operator Zike!: [link]

You can expect more materials from Menace’s excavations.

Edit: The blogpost originally stated that Snuskis was Finnish, while in reality he was, of course, Swedish.

RX7 Collection – C64 Disk Covers

An old Dutch C64 scene member, RX7 of Irresistible Trading Company (ITC), has provided us with scans of C64 disk covers from the late 1980s, drawn by himself and fellow Dutch sceners. This batch of artefacts is particularly interesting. Firstly, these groups, who seem to have operated on a local and regional level only, are largely unknown. Half of them did not leave any digital traces in nowadays’ scene archives, thus these covers are the only material proof of their existence. Secondly, the covers drawn by RX7 himself for his group, ITC, are not photocopies, but master covers which were used to produce b/w copies in order to swap them at copyparties and use them with disks for mailswapping. Master covers from the 1980s are hardly to be found anywhere on the internet, so we’re particularly glad about this contribution.

• C.A.M.P. disk cover by ADPC (1989) [link]
• Falcon disk cover by ? (1989) [link]
• 3 Fire-Eagle disk covery by ? (late 1980s) [link1] [link2] [link3]
• Future Force 7003 disk cover by ADPC (1989) [link]
• Future Force 7003 disk cover by RX7 (1989) [link]
• 11 Irresistable Trading Company master disk covers by RX7 (1989) [link1] [link2] [link3] [link4] [link5] [link6] [link7] [link8] [link9] [link10] [link11]
• Irresistable Trading Company disk cover by ADPC (1989) [link]
• The Wizards disk cover by The Saboteur (1989) [link]

S11 Collection – Old Amiga Flyers

Our next batch of papers comes from S11/Desire, who was so kind to scan several party invitation, flyers and magazine votesheets from his active period in the Amiga demoscene in the early 1990s. They are highly interesting artefacts of the early days of the demoscene – particularly the very detailed party invitations, which give insight on how demoparties were advertised and conducted “back in the days”.

• Amega Party 1991 invitation sheet [link]
• Defcon One & Sanity Meeting 1991 invitation sheet [link]
• Prime 1992 invitation sheet [link]
• Chit Chat diskmagazine message sheet (1993?) [link]
• Global News diskmagazine votesheet (1995) [link]
• Global News diskmagazine issue 2 promotion sheet (1995) [link]
• Nordic Report diskmagazine votesheet (1992) [link]
• Midnite Mess diskmagazine issue 1 promotion sheet (1992) [link]

As a kind of bonus, S11 also provided us with a flyer for the (in)famous PainStation arcade machine, which was spread at the Evoke 2004 demoparty where the arcade was exhibited and excessively used by the visitors: [link]