{"id":3421,"date":"2019-11-04T21:50:12","date_gmt":"2019-11-04T21:50:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gotpapers.scene.org\/?p=3421"},"modified":"2024-05-24T09:03:30","modified_gmt":"2024-05-24T09:03:30","slug":"zippys-letters-the-cynix-p-o-box","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gotpapers.scene.org\/?p=3421","title":{"rendered":"Zippy’s Letters: The Cynix P.O. Box"},"content":{"rendered":"

Famous Scottish Atari ST cracker<\/abbr> Zippy<\/strong> a.k.a Absu, member of the groups Cynix<\/em> and The Medway Boys<\/em>, who was very recently interviewed on Codetapper.com<\/a>, provided us with photographs from his letter archive. This time, we bring you a very special portion of these documents: The inbox, so to say, of the Cynix P.O. box in Merseyside from 1992-1994. Most of these letters stem from less-known sceners<\/abbr> or even complete outsiders, non-scene<\/abbr> fans and users of Cynix cracks, encouraging the group to continue cracking<\/abbr> in a time where the Atari software industry was already in decline. They were answering to a poll of sorts, initiated by Cynix themselves, who, in the scrolltexts of several<\/a> crack<\/a> intros<\/abbr><\/a>, urged users to write them if they did care for Cynix to continue cracking. And they did – from all over the world! In what is just a small surviving part of the letters Cynix received, we find letters and postcards not just from all over the UK, but also from Ireland, Germany, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Iceland, Serbia, Australia, Greece, Sweden, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, and Slovenia. These letters – some by people who would become prominent Atari sceners, some by unknown home computer users – testify not just to the transnational audience an active cracking group could reach, but also to the fact that the cracking scene and its protagonists mattered to a lot of people far outside the scene itself. These are literally fan letters, hailing whom the authors perceived as heroes for letting them enjoy software for free.<\/p>\n

You can download the high quality photos and metadata sheets of these 74 letters from our archive under \/zippy\/cynix_po_box\/<\/a>, or browse through them in the gallery below.<\/p>\n