Tell me about swappers
category: general [glöplog]
Looking around on the net, there seems to be little to none info on how swappers (both pirate and demoscene) worked back in the day. Is there anyone here who would like to tell their story and anecdotes?
many other blogposts at http://gotpapers.untergrund.net/ refer to swapping and its material atrifacts, too.
What do you want to know? There's quite a few of us around in Pouet I believe :)
Ah, the daily routine of grabbing a bunch of disks from the mailbox after school, frantically copying disks and then rushing to the post office before it closed. Good times.
Ah, the daily routine of grabbing a bunch of disks from the mailbox after school, frantically copying disks and then rushing to the post office before it closed. Good times.
And not getting homework done in time because of copying disks...
No fake stamps please! ;)
dipswitch: Yeah, that kida stuff. How you guys worked.
Ah the good old days, carving your own "Postage Paid" stamp out of a potato ,and sending discs all over the world with it.
Bjerstedt:
you got sth wrong here: The author of a post is always shown UNDER his/her post. Your last post was adressed towards "break", not "dipswitch", atleast if you referred to
Generally for demoscene it was just that...reading diskmags/scrollers/nfos to get adresses, contact them via disk in envelope with sth new on it (best was sth really new by your own group...also good newest releases from latest party...bad was some game, no matter if new or old!) and some textfile as letter. Then you hoped for the people you contacted to send sth back...if they did, you had a new contact and you kept sending disks and letters to eachother.
If not, you lost some disk(s).
I had only few contacts and didn´t swap for that long...coding took all of my time anyway!
So maybe a real swapper wants to elaborate some more...
you got sth wrong here: The author of a post is always shown UNDER his/her post. Your last post was adressed towards "break", not "dipswitch", atleast if you referred to
Quote:
Ah, the daily routine of grabbing a bunch of disks from the mailbox after school, frantically copying disks and then rushing to the post office before it closed.
Generally for demoscene it was just that...reading diskmags/scrollers/nfos to get adresses, contact them via disk in envelope with sth new on it (best was sth really new by your own group...also good newest releases from latest party...bad was some game, no matter if new or old!) and some textfile as letter. Then you hoped for the people you contacted to send sth back...if they did, you had a new contact and you kept sending disks and letters to eachother.
If not, you lost some disk(s).
I had only few contacts and didn´t swap for that long...coding took all of my time anyway!
So maybe a real swapper wants to elaborate some more...
okkie: back in the days when MFX still made proper art!
One of the aspects was that quantity was preferred over quality.
Another aspect was copy-parties.
A third aspect is that your room became more known than the local computer store for older couples to get free games.
You had to "care" to be good. Caring was/is giving (altuism).
Most underated swapper in history was Fred Fish who invented Public Domain (we will never forget you).
Another aspect was copy-parties.
A third aspect is that your room became more known than the local computer store for older couples to get free games.
You had to "care" to be good. Caring was/is giving (altuism).
Most underated swapper in history was Fred Fish who invented Public Domain (we will never forget you).
Interesting thought labeling Fred Fish as a swapper. :-) I thought of him more to be a publisher really. He published/swapped several of my Amiga games, for which I loved him to no end because I had no contacts back then. (And now I find "cracked" versions of them on some Amiga archives on the internet. Silly...)
I remember back in my C64 days accompanying a friend to Fantasy/FCS for buying(!) games (what lamers we've been...), and how impressed I was seeing a shelf there with stacks of floppy discs labeled "Hotline", "Jewels" and other addresses of my personal heroes. I showed him a (bad) demo of mine, and he actually decided to spread it for me! How proud I was...
Huh, Christmas nostalgia is striking again. :)
I remember back in my C64 days accompanying a friend to Fantasy/FCS for buying(!) games (what lamers we've been...), and how impressed I was seeing a shelf there with stacks of floppy discs labeled "Hotline", "Jewels" and other addresses of my personal heroes. I showed him a (bad) demo of mine, and he actually decided to spread it for me! How proud I was...
Huh, Christmas nostalgia is striking again. :)
Using your girlfriend's hairspray on stamps so people could wipe off the ink and resend them, late night conference calls with people all over the world, the emergence of the whole 'zero day' phenomenon, copy parties in Venlo, random people showing up at your house to copy stuff ... My parents were flabbergasted I had friends all over the world that sent care packages and elaborately illustrated jiffy bags :)
ɧคɾɗվ.: coincidentally just today i had an over 20yo handwritten swapletter from you in my hands.
originally i was looking for my passport and stumbled over a little bag of swapletters while searching. :D
originally i was looking for my passport and stumbled over a little bag of swapletters while searching. :D
Laughing at all the lamers who fucked around cluelessly with glue, tape and spray on their stamps and instead sending your packages to a non-existing freemail address with the real destination as the sender...
@ДаɎяԹર્મેΞΞ: Wanna scan the letters for "Got Papers?"? Of course, we'd censor the real names and street addresses before putting the stuff online. Please get in touch through http://gotpapers.untergrund.net/?page_id=15.
I heard about that, but in the eighties you would be days behind everyone else, also, be a grown man about it ;) jeez louise
^re: havoc ofc ...
Well OK, I exaggerated a bit: by the time we figured that trick out most of the planet had already bought modems so there were very few stamp tamperers left to laugh at.
But the antwoordnummer trick is totally real and actually worked, even for sending post to foreign addresses. ~5 years ago a disbelieving colleague tried it and it still worked :)
But the antwoordnummer trick is totally real and actually worked, even for sending post to foreign addresses. ~5 years ago a disbelieving colleague tried it and it still worked :)
I left the swapping right around Compunet and boards with PAL stuff on them, never knew the antwoordnummer stuff worked smoothly in NL, my packages just would get delayed somewhere :(
Then there were urban legends about the Anarchist's Cookbook floppy bombs, IIRC none of the recipes ever really worked, but everybody was 14 years old and super lame, come to think of it :)
Trying to dig up more hazy memories
Then there were urban legends about the Anarchist's Cookbook floppy bombs, IIRC none of the recipes ever really worked, but everybody was 14 years old and super lame, come to think of it :)
Trying to dig up more hazy memories
Haha, stamps back. Gold old days...
True, the biggest disadvantage of the antwoordnummer trick was speed of delivery. You could optimize things a bit by selecting an antwoordnummer in the same sorting area as the final recipient but it would still take a couple of days extra. At that point spreading stuff as quickly as possible (for which purpose there were BBS-es) was less of a concern than the shipment price I guess.
Another dirty trick I've used to cut down shipping costs (until we found antwoordnummer) was to copy DSDD Atari floppies onto cheap 360k 5,25 media. After copying, you'd remove the floppy sleeve and put only the magnetic media in an envelope. That way, you could send ~3-4 times more disks for the same stamp price \o/
And another one, which wasn't used very frequently but it's worth mentioning because it is related to the antwoordnummer trick and it was even more obscure and funny (imho): If you wanted to send your friends a short greeting, like a birthday wish, or maybe some cheatcodes, or anything else that today you would convey in a Tweet or SMS, back in the day there were a few antwoordnummers that would take care of that for you for free- as long as you received an answer. Those institutions were called "banks", and you'd just write "1ct" and your message on a "girobetaalkaart" in the comment box near the receiver's account details, then send it off to the bank's freepost address and they would invariably take care of the rest :)
Another dirty trick I've used to cut down shipping costs (until we found antwoordnummer) was to copy DSDD Atari floppies onto cheap 360k 5,25 media. After copying, you'd remove the floppy sleeve and put only the magnetic media in an envelope. That way, you could send ~3-4 times more disks for the same stamp price \o/
And another one, which wasn't used very frequently but it's worth mentioning because it is related to the antwoordnummer trick and it was even more obscure and funny (imho): If you wanted to send your friends a short greeting, like a birthday wish, or maybe some cheatcodes, or anything else that today you would convey in a Tweet or SMS, back in the day there were a few antwoordnummers that would take care of that for you for free- as long as you received an answer. Those institutions were called "banks", and you'd just write "1ct" and your message on a "girobetaalkaart" in the comment box near the receiver's account details, then send it off to the bank's freepost address and they would invariably take care of the rest :)
I can also remember that pre-Intarwebs i used some custom made "serial" cables with special copying software (PARA-X i think) so copying stuff from two PCs was a lot faster than all normal possibilities. Excellent when you want to share each others C:\GAMES\* at computer clubs and what not :) Cant really find much info on that on the intarwebs, so if anyone knows. cheers.