Posted By
Hans
on 2014-11-09
12:04:40
|  Re: Original Plus/4 scene?
Here in Germany, the Plus/4 -or better say the Commodore 264 scene- was a quite living one between maybe 1984 and 1990. There were some billboards but the most active way of interaction & communication were the various clubs and their magazines. The better part of those magazines was spread by 5.1/4", and a few came out as print magazines. If I remember correctly, none of the magazines, either disk or printed, was for nothing - for all of them one had to pay.
Swapping, in particular pirated stuff, was very, very popular. Of course. - Contacts for swapping were made either by exchange of postal addresses via the clubs, and as from 1989/1990, by ads in a special ad magazine which every German user will remember as the "Computer-Flohmarkt".
Seek-and-offer ads in club magazines and in the "Computer-Flohmarkt" were linked with the PLK:
By that time, the German postal service offered an anonymous kind of "poste-restante" service. A user of that service did not require a PO box. He just had to apply for a postal ID card, and there was no need to leave name & address for it (or, if required, any false data would have done because there was no proof required). The number of this postal ID card could be used as an recipient's address, without quoting a name or else. This ID card was namend the "PLK".
All swapping was done by surface mail, using the famous service as described above. German users might remember this as the lovely "PLK" = Postlagerkarte.
Those were the days....
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