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Saxonia Issue 02 Part 028
*** SWAPPING IN THE PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE! ***
By Zerox/Gods
[l
[1 Punisher/Gods^Nah[0 asked for over one and a half year ago if I could write
an article about the past swapping for his coming mag called [1 Cocktail.[0 As
that mag never saw the light of day, I've decided to change the article a
bit and write about the swapping of the past, present and future.
Swapping has not changed that much during the last 5-10 years, but I'll try
to write something about the difference.
In the past all decent swappers had a po box for instance. Not only the
ones that dealt with illegal activities as spreading games or cracking them
had po boxes, but also the ordinary swappers. Sometimes you never knew the
real name of the person you wrote with, but only the handle and which group
he was a member of. Anyway, the last 7-8 years it has become [1 more and more
rare to have a po box.[0
Even though there were lots of mags and packs to spread the adverts in the
past, the swapper usually had to pay for his advertisements. Normally it
was just a disk or two, but some mags also asked for money.
Naturally there were a lot more swappers in the past, infact there were
lots more swappers than there are sceners left today. It was far from
unusual to have more than 50 active and fast swapper contacts.
To have many contacts and fast swapping was very expensive. Therefore
quite many swappers began either to fake the stamps or low pay for their
sendings. 10 years ago [1 the faking more or less stopped in the western
scene as so many people got caught for faking.[0
I would also say that it was quite unusual to write letters saved on disks
in the past. The normal thing to do from the beginning of the scene until
around 10 years ago, was of course to write paperletters.
The letters of the past were very small also. This was not only caused by
the fact it takes longer time to prepare paperletters, but also because
most swappers had so many contacts and letters to write every week. A
normal letter could only be like this" Thanx for stuff. It was great.
This time I'm sending you... it's very hot. Please spread. C U L8er.
Signed xxx ".
The swapper was usually the person in the group that was in touch with
other sceners and groups around. The coders, graphicians and musicians
were usually more isolated, but sometimes they were in touch with a few
others as well. Therefore the swapper was quite important in the past. He
represented his group, and naturally made his group known by spreading
their productions. He also got productions from other groups, so that the
groups that didn't visit parties, knew what was going on, saw the standard
of the other groups etc. I guss the modem didn't arrive before 1990 or so,
and there weren't that many boards in 1990. However, that exploded around
1992 I guess.
When looking at the swapping scene of today, it's extremely small. I'm not
sure about it, but perhaps there are 20 people that could somewhat be
conidered as swappers? There are at least not many more than that,
probably less. When checking out the EuroChart 46 and the list of the so
called best swappers, I would dare to say only around 5 of these people are
actually swapping nowadays. To be a swapper you actually have to send out
some letters. [2 It's not good enough that you sent out two letters last
year.[0
Therefore people have written that the swapping scene has been dead for
years now. They claim that internet destroyed the swapping. And yes,
there is much truth in this. Because the internet is so easy to access, it
takes about no time to find what you're looking for, the productions are
available fast after they've been released, and it's a very cheap way
compared to swapping. The need for swappers and swapping in general
disappeared.
Well, I'll tell you that there's a future for swapping. But you should
more or less forget about the old forms of swapping, unless you still
believe in friendship and nice letter exchanges. If you're more or less
only in for it because of the wares, then forget about the disks and the
past swapping. The future is [1 obviously exchange of CDs.[0 With just sending
one CD, it's possible to send around [2 800mb[0 of productions for a very low
cost. Apart from the fact that it's very cheap getting stuff this way (at
least if you only possess an ISDN or analog phoneline), it also saves you a
lot of time. Just think how much time you would spend gaining 800mb of
scene related stuff.
If you still believe in the power of swapping, and want to continue a fine
teadition, then this new way of swapping could be something for you.
Yes, swapping is [1 still alive in 2003!!
