rubber stamps | got papers?

Here is the second batch of materials provided by an anonymous contributor (click here for the first instalment). Once again, you can browse through the paper relics of the very dawn of the home computer cracking & demo cultures – fragile traces of long forgotten individuals and groups as well as of those who came to be considered as scene legends later on. Among the more unusual scans from this update is the disk cover done by the early Amiga group Warfalcons. Even though Amiga floppy disks did not technicaly need paper sleeves, Warfalcons still made a batch of these – just like the usual ones on the C64, but in 3,5″ size. Another remarkable artifact is a letter from a Belgian Amiga swapper around 1986 – typewritten on his father’s busines card. Another example of how much early digital subcultures had to rely on analogue techniques.

• Letter from CCC/Firesoft Inc. (Belgium) to undisclosed recepient, around 1986 [metadata]
• Cleveland Distribution Service sticker, mid-1980s [metadata]
• Commando Frontier sticker, between 1987 and 1989 [metadata]
• Dominators business card, between 1986 and 1989 [metadata]
• D.S. Compware sticker sheet, between 1986 and 1987 [metadata]
• Italian Spreading Service sticker, mid-1980s [metadata]
• Plutonium Crackers sticker sheet, around 1986 [metadata]
• Soldiers Against Protection sticker, between 1986 and 1988 [metadata]
• Stars promo card, 1986 [metadata]
• The Fall Guys business card, 1987 [metadata]
• The Light Circle rubber stamp, between 1986 and 1988 [metadata]
• The Organized Crime sticker, between 1987 and 1988 [metadata]
• The Orgasmatron Crew sticker sheet, 1987 [metadata]
• The Warriors 1881 sticker, between 1986 and 1988 [metadata]
• The Wizards sticker, around 1987 [metadata]
• Unknown cartoon cutout, mid-1980s [metadata]
• Warfalcons disk cover, around 1987-1988 [metadata]

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.