Ukrainian Demoscene Swap Letters from the 1990s

This time, we have something really special – not flyers, magazines and other replicated materials, but private letters from scener to scener, exchanged while swapping disks. This is something very familiar to those readers who were part of the scene in the 1980s, but something that members of younger generations hardly ever got to see. Here, however, the platform and location of the authors is rather unusual: The letters are written by Ukrainian ZX Spectrum sceners in the 1990s. While the Internet was a luxury in the post-Soviet countries, mailswapping was the usual way of interregional software exchange – and, obviously, it was not just enough to pack a disk into an envelope. Spectrum users exchanged personal letters, photographs, funny collages… This is where news and gossip was spread, long-distance friendships were forged, and new demo productions took shape. The small stack of letters presented here today was originally posted by VBI on his blog, and he was so kind as to provide us with higher resolution scans for permanent archiving. Thanks to him, we now have a unique insight into an early post-Soviet home computer culture.

As a new feature, we now have a built-in gallery at the bottom of the post, so you can browse the pictures quickly. There, you can also see the detailed metadata for the scans – they include summaries of the letters (which are, of course, written in Russian with bits of Ukrainian in between). To download the hi-res scans, however, click on the single links below pointing to our archiving space at scene.org.

• Rob F. to VBI, early 1999 [link]
• Consul to VBI, 19 September 1997 [link]
• Epson to VBI, 29 September 1997 [link]
• Injector to VBI, 25 August 1997 [link]
• Viator to VBI, 28 November 1996 [link]
• Viator to VBI, 19 December 1997 [link]

Pirates #6 – Another Papermag Resurfaced

We managed to bring back another long-lost paper magazine – issue #6 of Pirates, the Belgian C-64 crackers‘ magazine edited by F4CG. A thousand thanks go to Reset/Transcom, who found a stash of papermags and was willing to scan them and share them with us (more to come in the next weeks). This issue offers, amongst other things, a report on the Australian C-64 scene, an interview with famous game-musician Markus Schneider as a young kid, party reports from Contex Copy-Party (Finland), Crazy Copy-Party (Switzerland), Venlo Meeting, TEC Copy-Party (Australia), and a wild anti-communist rant by Hungarian C-64 groups.

Download the issue >>> here <<<.

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]