Swappers did not just stick floppy disks into envelopes – they also had to put up with a lot of paperwork. Before the era of online communciation, building up trust and keeping social networks intact meant writing paper letters to your contacts. For sceners who communicated a lot through postal channels, it was an obvious choice to print own stationeries / letterheads for higher recognition value and a professional appearance. The task of writing letters, however, could become a time management problem for “mega swappers“, who sent out dozens of envelopes every day. Thus they printed standard blanks where they just needed to tick boxes. The options available on these fill-out forms, ranging from dead serious to rather humorous, served to evaluate the contacts’ previous sendings’ quality, to communicate requests for further software exchanges, and to get messages across. For today’s update, Goat, Lance, Se7en, and Thorion provided us with samples of such swapper stationeries and blanks, which were common in the late 1980s and early 1990s all over the global scene – from Denmark to Australia, from Germany to Hungary.

• Danish Science letter blank, 1989 [metadata]
• Faces stationery, 1991 [metadata]
• Level 99 (TLI) stationery, 1989 [metadata]
• Rock’n Role stationery, 1991 [metadata]
• Stardom letter blank, 1989 [metadata]
• Syllinor/Chromance stationery, 1991 [metadata]
• The Force letter blank, 1989 [metadata]
• Thorion/Targets letter blank, early 1990s [metadata]

NB: If the images in the gallery below appear too small to figure out the details, you can always download high-quality scans at the “metadata” links above!