by Chester of Brainstorm
This following article was published in a professional German Magazine, called "AMIGA JOKER".
And again, it has started once more with the brother of our "girl-friend" (AMIGA), the C64. With the help of one of the first printer-programs, called "News-room", the first mag with the legendary name "ILLEGAL" was published. At the beginning there were only tests of cracked software, but with the time more and more rubrics were coming to the mag: articles about Copy-Parties, hardware, crackergroups, hardware-plans or short stories. None thought that this mag will survive, because there were not a lot of readers. But that wasn't right: 4 years long was "ILLEGAL" published, and they had more than 1000 readers! The publishers have had a big name in the business, because of that. That was the reason why a lot of freaks began to organize piratemags, too. But none of them reached the quality and the of this amazing magazine. People wanted to spread these mags better and so they began to start to publish diskmags, an electronical newspaper. They could copied the disks and spread them. The guys from "Alpha Flight" were the first who started such a diskmagazine for the Amiga. Their "CRACKER JOURNAL" contains many scene-reports, interviews and charts, but there are also competitions and stuff about hardware. There were some features build in, like lowpassfilter on/off, music on/off, and so on... for a better comfort. The articles are all written from freaks all over the world. Of course the CRACKER JOURNAL was spreaded like a new crack. Because of this success, a lot of other crews decided to publish a diskmagazine, too. But that wasn't something special. There were only tests about books and LPs, articles about different music-styles, short stories and comics. The matter was, that these groups published only one or two issues. The CJ was until autumn 89 without competition. But then a boom of diskmags started: almost every second week there was a new one. One of the best is ZINE from the Swiss group "Brainstorm". A brilliant mixture of scenereports and "normal" articles, and a very "friendly" menu are in this mag, too. Now, there are so many diskmagazines, but where is the good old paper? Until December 1989 there wasn't any papermags around. The Austrian group "Subway" finally managed it with their NEWS FROM SYSTEM FOUR. You could say that the NEWS are the Amigaversion of ILLEGAL, because most of the articles are about the Amiga-scene. Last but not least there is the STOLEN DATA from "DCS-Tristar-Anarchy UK". They were the first who prepared a papermagazine plus a disk. The part on paper looks a little bit like the stuff from Subway. On the disk there are the three best demos of the month, charts and an own diskmag.
Text from AMIGA JOKER. Translated to English and typed in by Chester.
This article originally appeared in the Amiga diskmagazine "Zine #5" by Brainstorm 1990.
Some content may refer to activities that are illegal in some countries. BitFellas does not support such activity.
Addresses and other contact information were only valid when this magazine was originally published, in june of 1990.
Go back to articlelist |
