3.5″ floppy disks, used with Amiga computers, were much sturdier than their 5.25″ predecessors from the C64 days. Thus, sceners could not only use them for a much longer time period, but also could subject them to a rougher handling. Disk covers were not needed anymore – instead, swappers left the marks directly on the casings of the disks. Like graffiti taggers, they fought for the best spot on the disk to leave their mark on a medium that was to pass through dozens of sceners’ hands. Even the tiniest unoccupied space was used to squeeze one’s tag onto the plastic surface.

Craid/Haujobb provided us with a small batch of 17 disks from his swapping days. They stem from the mid- to late-1990s. At that time, mail swapping was on the decline due to wide-spread modem usage and the victory march of the internet. Only in Poland, where the Amiga demoscene was vibrant, yet telephone/internet costs were high, mail swapping remained the main means for sceners to exchange data. Thus, the majority of the signatures and scribblings on the disks belong to Polish Amiga scene figures, but also some names of Amiga enthusiasts in Western Europe, like Ghandy, Kure4Cancer, and Craid himself, are seen. These disks are among the most recent remnants of a vibrant culture of digital filesharing networks contructed by analogue means of communication – which existed for nearly two decades, before all-digital “filesharing networks” became the top buzzword of a new age.

You can download the package with high-quality scans here.