The arcade was a place to play games, meeting point. In the german part of switzerland there were almost only males (you could also gambel). They were dark in the most of cases.

In the ‘westschweiz’ there were a lot more women in also in the arcades and younger people (for example in Lausanne). 

In the arcades there were always different types of arcades (older and the latest), than ‘table football’, flippers and so on. 

Hah, I might not be the best to explain Amiga history, but I’ll do my best :) Fish disks were the main way to distribute public domain, open source, shareware etc. before the internet was wide-spread. People would send Fred Fish software, and he’d compile them into individual disks that people would copy. Magazines would have lots of companies that would allow you to order copies of these disks etc. He ended up creating over a 1000 disks this way. When cd-roms became a thing, you could order the whole collection on those. Those were strange times :)

Aminet was the most famous ftp-archive for amiga software. It was run by the same guy that made Brainfuck, Urban Müller. Rather than chronologically like fish disks, it was organized by topic, with readme’s for every file. You could upload to a staging area, and he’d put them in place. Much like fish disks, companies would print cd-roms with the latest from aminet for those not hooked up to the internets (or on 56k modems, which was most people).

The CFA was founded in 1987 in Basel, Switzerland, when 3-letter names were still in fashion. CFA stood for “Computer Freaks Association”. In the first months the CFA was a group of C64 fans and gaming tournaments were held in regular intervals. They organised a gaming room at a local School-Party of the RG in Basel.

The CFA started with pure Demo-Making and Software-Swapping. The first international contact was the Norwegian group The Sinister Realm 2013 Stavanger. One of the early meeting places was the Dial-Club, a local Computer-Center in Basel.
At this time a regular Exchange-Ring of Software between the members was built up.

The first Copy-Party visited by CFA members was Crazy & ZSS Party 1988 in Pratteln/Switzerland. In 1989 Members of the group was busted by police on a German Copy-Party, but thanks to slow Swiss legislation, no CFA member had any troubles at all after returning to Switzerland.
The CFA took part in Demo-Contests of other Swiss copy parties: Crazy & RCS Party 1989, Crazy Stardom Copy-Party 1989 and Fresh Party 1990. 

In the early days, our strategy was: focus on Switzerland. This changed with the first member expansion outside of Basel: 
German members: Snief and The Cure.
Liechtenstein members: Sandman.

War against another Swiss group Fresh, which led to a funny anti demo Fresh on Top. The war was officially ended at the Swiss Pirates Reunion 2002. (nowadays there are many friendship boundaries between the former 2 opponents).

The CFA has in the meantime started importing and cracking games: access to the major US BBS, latest wares and cards agogo. 

1990-1991 Cooperation with Italian Cracking Service from Italy.

11/1989-07/1993 reknown Disk Mag “Immortal Flash” an e-zine that become quite popular in the scene (later released by Atlantis).

In 02/1991 the CFA died and the remaining members built up Atlantis. More info in Joker Note.

Where people met, talked about computers, learnt about computers. Played games, designed games.

Yes also pirate software and games was part of this world. 

Italian part:
French part:
German part: Spielsalon

Computerclubs were a very important institution. 

0. Is a place and a community in the same and also a public in the same
1. Networking people in a non internet time.
2. Bringing KnowhHow to people (Courses)
3. Showing, Selling Hardware (Internally)
4. Own public magazines
5. Part of Creating Groups/interested people
6. Only available in bigger towns 

very important also for the developers of games. it was knowhow. the ground language. 

Let's bring together the memories and artefacts from those times. 

The topics vintage computing and vintage gaming are of course intertwined. 

First gaming is a part of the whole digitalisation. But before computer were in every household the consoles were there. The first funny digitalisation and alternative to the non existing tv-program (share the screen). And then the homecomputer in the private areas came ‘home’.  So games became again software in the area of computing. 

And so on … 

Spreadpoint is an Amiga demo group, formed in 1986 by Marvin and (D-)Mike.

Amicom and Depeche joined the group in 1989. Swapper advert in Cracker Journal 16 (october 1989), listing an address in Bad Aibling, Germany.

They were coarrangers of the CeBit 1990 demoparty in march. Depeche left the group sometime this year.

With the march 1991 release Innovation Part Two, Psy announced he was rejoining Spreadpoint from Axxis. Grmblwrz (december 1991) mentioned, "We also welcome our new American members - Paninaro and Micro".

The october 1992 cracktro for Pinball Fantasies welcomed Ice Tea and The French Dewd to the group.

Upstream 1 (january 1993) reported that Cocaine joined Addonic from Spreadpoint & Amiga Industries along with his bbs Moria.

Brainstorm is a Swiss-based demo group, that has existed in two distinct periods; their formation as an Amiga demo group in the period between 1989 and 1993, and their reformation as a mainly pc demo group in 2006 until present day. They were originally formed a short while before may 1989 by graphician Chester and coder Majestic, and their first release was Lazer Roll. During the summer they recruited more members (like Orlando), and at the end of the summer vacation they were joined by the entire group Axxis (Bird, ...). This group had both a Swiss and German section, but the German section was found to be substandard and was forced to leave after a while. Another member, swapper Joker, left the scene soon after. They had by now started planning what would become the diskmagazine Zine. It was originally conceptuated as a cooperation between Brainstorm and another Swiss group at the time, Setrox, but the latter eventually decided against being part of the project. Due to this, Setrox coder The Accused left to join Brainstorm. Zine 1 was released in october. They were now a totally Swiss group again, except for two German members - Shadow and Yankee.

Advert in Cracker Journal 18 (january 1990), looking for members. Cracker Journal 19 (march 1990) reported, "Angel Dust joined Brainstorm and his name is now Six Pack." Sometime between Zine 3 (february 1990) and Zine 4 (april 1990) they decided to kick their German writer Yankee because he wasn't productive enough. He was a freelance writer for D.I.S.C. for a while before finally joining Addonic. Zine 5 was released at the Alcatraz Pentcost Party 1990 at the beginning of june. It was to be Orlando's last issue as editor, as The Accused had returned from his army service.

Metamorphosis (august 1991) mentioned their bbs Cheese-Line as 'new', and listed Accused, Axel, Bird, Chesney, Chester, Droid, ESA, Fly, Grubi, Luke, Macho, Majestic, Odie, Oli, Orlando, Patsy, Peace, Scattergold and Truxton as active members. Danish megaswapper The Pride joined the group in late september, and was sent a new packmenu for creating a new series of packs (see Superpack 1) - which would become the Obsession packseries, starting in october. All this was also reported in R.A.W 1 (november 1991).

R.A.W 2 (february 1992) reported that The Pride moved on from the group to join Sanity, and that a Finnish section had been opened by Phazer, Extabulator, Hoover, Mac, Top Azz and Voyager.

January 1993 saw the release of Axel's musicdisk Musicland, featuring among other songs his 8th-placed Technology from The Party 1992 the month before.

With support for multicolor sprites and a custom chip for waveform generation, the C64 could create superior visuals and audio compared to systems without such custom hardware.

The C64 dominated the low-end computer market (except in the UK and Japan, lasting only about six months in Japan[7]) for most of the later years of the 1980s.[8] For a substantial period (1983–1986), the C64 had between 30% and 40% share of the US market and two million units sold per year,

In the UK market, the C64 faced competition from the BBC Micro, the ZX Spectrum, and later the Amstrad CPC 464.[11] but the C64 was still the second most popular computer in the UK after the ZX Spectrum.[12] The Commodore 64 failed to make any impact in Japan. The Japanese market was dominated by Japanese computers, such as the NEC PC-8801, Sharp X1, Fujitsu FM-7, and MSX.[13]

Part of the Commodore 64's success was its sale in regular retail stores instead of only electronics or computer hobbyist specialty stores.

One computer gaming executive stated that the Nintendo Entertainment System's enormous popularity – seven million sold in 1988, almost as many as the number of C64s sold in its first five years – had stopped the C64's growth. Trip Hawkins reinforced that sentiment, stating that Nintendo was "the last hurrah of the 8-bit world".[57]

 

 

 

A lot of works in the area of electromechanic/optic calculation in games.

Pinballs are really computing hells. 

Culture towards technology changed massively in the last 50 years. 

The listing culture is a hybrid between gutenberg galaxis and software. Software was often distributed in the mainframe time as source code ( c ). each system had a different set of hardware, processor. c and co were the platform. You could compile it for your system. 

The listing culture brought source code to the magazines and could be published. first with basic and co for homecomputers, later with checksums, than basic with assembler inlines, than only shortcodes. 

of course by typing in you could learn how to code and solve problems.

Tracker were software - used especially on the Amiga. The most of the music was created in this type of music software. And the people behind the swiss games of the 80ies/90ies even created a tracker and the possibility to use the same framework also in games. 

Pierre Jaquet-Droz (French: [ʒakɛ dʁo]; 1721–1790) was a watchmaker of the late eighteenth century. He was born on 28 July 1721 in La Chaux-de-Fonds, in Canton Neuchâtel, at the time part of the Kingdom of Prussia.[1] He lived in Paris, London, and Geneva, where he designed and built animated dolls known as automata to help his firm sell watches and mechanical caged songbirds.

 

The Jaquet-Droz automata

Constructed between 1768 and 1774 by Pierre Jaquet-Droz, his son Henri-Louis (1752-1791), and Jean-Frédéric Leschot (1746-1824), the automata include The Writer (made of 6000 pieces), The Musician (2500 pieces), and The Draughtsman (2000 pieces).

His astonishing mechanisms fascinated the kings and emperors of Europe, China, India and Japan.

part of the cracking job in the most of the cases. 

The game development process was splittet into different type of productions. Each part had its own tools like coding / assembler, images > paint tools and of course music with the trackers. 

Very big club with 600 (?) members. There are all paying money.  A lot of people found here other persons with the same ideas and interests.

It seems that the name ist also Statement. In german spoken as KAK means shit.

(money laundering?)

CODE > Graphics (Effects), Sound, SizeCoding > Effect, Synaesthesy  (Creativity Process)
Community > Concurrency > Metagame > Scene

GameDevs are gamedeveloppers. The name tells also a lot about the idea behind. The most important thing was the technical difficulties. 

Make games copyable. Some cracker groups where in the tradition of information freedom, others learned from cracking software creating software, others had fun, others were in a sport ‘who is first’ and of course also others gained money. 

Why switzerland? and not us? The rumor is: There was no law in switzerland against cracking. 

there are two aspects came together in the universal computer. 
1. computing (sorting)
2. control (cases, if then, input)
before this were seperated functions in analoge maschines.