“Send your list for mine.” The phrase turns up again and again in the classified pages of 1980s computer magazines. A reader with a cassette collection, or a box of disks, printed a name and address and invited strangers to write. The first letter carried no software, only a list of titles. If the lists matched, tapes or disks went into the post. For most of the 1980s, before modems were cheap enough for teenagers, this was how software moved between home computer owners who had never met, and it reached a long way beyond their own countries.
Most of it was copying. The long lists of titles in the ads were mostly lists of copies of commercial games, which infringed their publishers’ copyright; in Britain the law was amended in 1985 to name software as protected (see piracy). The same post also carried the productions of the cracking groups and, later, the demoscene, which ran its own network of “swappers” until the internet replaced them.
Fast facts
- How it started: an exchange of lists by post, then of tapes or disks.
- The directory: magazine small ads. Commodore Computing International printed private readers’ ads free, up to 32 words.
- The reach: two pages of ads, from 1988 and 1989, carry addresses in Britain, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Portugal, the Netherlands, Malta, Italy, South Africa, Australia, the USA and Uruguay.
- The scene version: cracking groups and demo groups traded new releases by post with contacts abroad; diskmags printed “contact addresses”.
- The cost: postage. Swappers reused stamps, coating them so the postmark could be washed off, and asked for them back: “Stamps back!”
Send your list for mine
A single page of Your Sinclair’s Input/Output classifieds in March 1989 shows the pattern. “I have over 600 games to swop. Many recent titles. Send your list for mine.” “I have over 1,200 games to swop with you. Send your list for mine.” “Do you want to swop games with me? If you do then send a list to…” Other readers on the page offered 250, 500, 550 and over 1,000 titles. These were claims in a free advert, not audited collections, but they were what traders thought worth boasting about. A list cost a stamp and showed what you had without giving anything away.
Not every trade was a copy. Some readers wanted particular titles and named their terms, “Originals only. My five for your four”, which is a different transaction from bulk copying: a swap of boxed games people had bought. The same page carried a “Software Swop Agency” that asked readers to “Send your list of what you’ve got and what you want” with a stamped addressed envelope, and Your Sinclair reminded readers that it could “accept no responsibility for the ads placed in Input/Output”.
The ads were not new in 1989. Your Spectrum’s small ads in May 1985 already ran swap offers, one ending “Your list for mine”.
Friends by post
The swap ads sat in the same columns as the pen-pal ads, and the two often ran together. “Pen pals wanted to swop games, music. Have over 600 games to swop.” “Anyone want a pen pal? I’ve got over 300 games.” One Icelandic reader on the March 1989 page wanted to swap heavy metal tapes rather than software. “Pen pals wanted, any age male/female. I have over 1600 games to swop incl Typhoon, mostly new,” ran another in January 1989.
For some traders the people mattered more than the programs. In 1994 the German magazine Amiga Joker interviewed a former C64 cracker, then 25, who had left the scene and now organised demo parties. In 1985 and 1986, he said, “since practically no affordable modems existed, we did exclusively mail trading, everything by ordinary post”, and mostly with groups abroad rather than within Germany. What attracted him was not the games but the chance “to get to know people from Denmark, Norway, Canada or the USA”. Post arrived “two or three times a week from all over the world”; traders sent each other small souvenirs, and some of the contacts became “real computer friendships” (his words in translation). He once talked on the phone to his Danish swap partner for so long that his pizza burned in the oven. He also described the risk: in 1988 police searched his home, because by then “quite a lot of people had my address”.
The world in the small ads
British readers did not trade only with each other. The March 1989 Your Sinclair page carried addresses in Portugal, the Netherlands, Norway, Ireland, South Africa and Uruguay, and a Portuguese reader who wanted pen pals “of any age, sex and nationality, to swop games”. The classified pages of Commodore Computing International in October 1988 reached further. Amiga and C64 owners in Norway, Sweden, Finland, Malta, Italy, Australia, South Africa and the United States all advertised for contacts, and the wording made the ambition plain: “C64 user wants to swap software with people all over the world”. The tone was sometimes blunt. “Swap or die! Send me your newest stuff and I send my newest stuff back! C64 disk only,” wrote a reader in Sweden. An Australian reader offered to “swap hot programs with people all over the world”. One Norwegian group advertised a membership scheme: “we can give you all the software you want! Membership £8.50.”
The scene’s post
The cracking groups of the mid-1980s used the same post office. Their aim was to be first with a new release, and a crack sent by post to contacts in several countries was how a group’s name spread (see the cracking scene and crack intros). The members who handled this were the swappers, and they did not hide. Retro Gamer’s history of the scene noted that “Swappers spread their details quite openly for such an illegitimate business, but it was the best way to get that all-important credibility.” Addresses appeared in crack intros, in demo scroll texts and in the diskmags, which ZZAP!64 described in 1992 as full of “the latest gossip and news of upcoming parties, as well as interviews, reports, contact addresses” and charts.
Postage was the main cost, and the scene had its own answer to it. “A thin layer of hairspray or wax was applied to the stamps so the postmarks could be washed off,” Retro Gamer wrote. “The recipient would then send them back with their return disks.” It added that more than a few groups had been caught “not from cracking, but by recycling the stamps”. A Polish swapper, looking back on the PC scene of 1997 to 2001, remembered the rule in two words, “Stamps back!”: everyone knew that when returning a letter and disks, you saved the envelope. The best swappers, he wrote, kept 80 to 100 regular contacts; he had about 90 when he left school in 2001, and the scene’s magazines ran charts of swappers alongside their charts of demos.
Modems and the end of the post
The post was slow, and bulletin boards were faster. As modems spread, the crackers moved to bulletin boards; Retro Gamer noted that boards were “equally costly”, in phone bills, but the “increased logistical efficiency was very enticing”. By the 1990s much of the swapping had moved from the post to modems, and a C64 diskmag such as Shock was, in 1993, the one to read “if you’re into modem-trading”. The post did not disappear at once. In the Polish PC demoscene, disks and “Stamps back!” envelopes were still going through the post at the end of the 1990s.
Sources
- Your Spectrum issue 14, May 1985: small ads, swap offers.
- Commodore Computing International vol. 7 no. 2, October 1988, pp. 120–121: classified ads (Norway, Sweden, Finland, Malta, Italy, Australia, South Africa, USA; “all over the world”; “Swap or die!”; the membership scheme; free private ads of up to 32 words).
- Your Sinclair issue 37, January 1989: Input/Output classifieds (“over 1600 games to swop incl Typhoon”).
- Your Sinclair issue 39, March 1989, p. 92: Input/Output classifieds (the “send your list for mine” ads, “Originals only”, the Software Swop Agency, pen pals, the Icelandic music swapper, overseas addresses, the disclaimer).
- Dr. Freak, interview with a former cracker, Amiga Joker (Germany), June 1994: mail trading in 1985–86, contacts abroad, the police search (quotations translated).
- ZZAP!64 issue 90, November 1992: public domain column on diskmags.
- Retro Gamer issue 22, 2005: feature on the demo scene (“Swap till you drop”: swappers, stamps, bulletin boards).
- Commodore Force, May 1993, public domain column: Shock and modem-trading (see Scene Diskmags).
- Paweł Winiarski, “Dyskietki w kopercie, czyli zawód: swapper”, Antyweb, 20 November 2013 (web, secondary; recollection, in Polish): swapping in the Polish PC demoscene from the end of 1997, “Stamps back!”, 80–100 contacts, swapper charts. https://antyweb.pl/dyskietki-w-kopercie-czyli-zawod-swapper/