Beautiful times. I especially loved swapping - that is you got a list of people and their addresses from a magazine and you saved on disks your favourite demos and zines (preferable those nobody else had) and then you added some random stuff for example label off your favourite drink, wrote some poems, maybe added a dried flower and so on and then you also added postage stamps. Then you were hoping that whoever received it on the other side liked it and he or she would have sent you something else. Sometimes you would just just pass on the disks you received and just added your name to a txt file or some funny looking directory. There was also a trick to put a glue over your stamps and it was the custom that the person would send you those stamps back so you could then dissolve the postage stamp and reuse them :-)
The internet somewhat killed this unfortunately.
Decades later I still remember the feeling of a postman holding packages in his hands from various places in the world and the excitement, what am I going to find? I miss that.
I had a PO box where all the packages were sent to. I still can remember how excited I was, riding my bike (I was 15) to the postal office and open that treasure chest full of foreign packages. I'm from The Netherlands and did a lot of swapping with people from Belgium, Germany, Norway, Sweden and Finland. Yes, real good times with a lot of friendly people.
Oh, how I envied those PO Boxes you guys got down in Europe - Up north, it was practically impossible to get one of those for non-businesses, and especially a no-go for broke teenagers!
It's funny how there are regional differences in how to avoid the postage fees. I remember friends switching sender and recipient on the letter and then not using any stamps instead. (Not that I ever tried that myself.) I had never heard of the glue trick. :D
You might enjoy Reddit’s secret Santa thing. It’s not demoscene oriented of course but the idea of sending and receiving random cheap gifts is neat. Plus a number of celebrities participate and when was the last time you participated in a gift exchange along with Ian McKellen?
I participated this year and I wound up with a full book trilogy in a genre I really like and I wound up buying someone a relatively new video game for their current console. It was a very pleasant experience and I will now likely participate further.
I think they've done it for 8 years now to good success.
It’s been some time since I took part, but besides one time (got a very simplistic board game for children) I got something cool and fitting every time. I actually still have the motivational sloth poster "live slow, die whenever" hanging in my office :)
Thankfully. Seems like the bigger risk is of the Secret Santa not actually sending anything; I'm hesitant to do it because I know I'll be that asshole who spaces out and forgets about it.
Grew up in West Germany when the Demoscene was at it's height, but never heard of "pink PLK cards". Could you give a hint what that is?
EDIT: Found it "Postlagerkarte"[1], I have heard that term before, but never was aware what it was. It feels strange that at a time you could do things easily, legally and anonymously, all at the same time. As a minor, at that. Let alone anonymously sending things to strangers. Admittedly I miss that world more than the Demoscene.
For some reason I totally missed this time. Can you let me know when the demoscene roughly had its peak?
Friends of mine had the police search their houses in 1987 for exchanging cracked C64 games with people all over West Germany. They were still adolescents, so they got away with a 100DM fine.
I was just a harmless teenager, copying games from friends (but also buying quite a few), but it seems I closer to some high profile crackers than I would have imagined. I wonder how many of them became part of the Demoscene.
PLK = "PostLagerKarte", literally "mail storage card". It was (abolished 1991) a way to receive letters anonymously; like a P.O. box without your name attached to it. The [Wikipedia page](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postlagerkarte) even explicitly mentions its "illegal usage in the computing scene", so GP was likely referring to his friend using their P.O. box for (illegally) cracked software.
Here's a shot at translating that Wikipedia paragraph:
> Until their abolition, PLK cards were especially popular in the cracker scene because, compared to a regular P.O. box, no personal data had to be shared with the respective post office. PLKs were primarily used for anonymous sending and receiving of pirated software on floppy disks. [citation needed imho] The PLK addresses themselves were often listed digitally in the cracktros.
pretty much a temporary "PO box" you could get anonymously. You bought a card with a code from your post office, and then people could send stuff to the post office addressed to that number, and the card holder could pick them up. Relatively popular with the cracker/warez szene.
