Interesting photos, I remember Roelof Koning from a few Speccy meetings I attended in Germany and the Netherlands in the 90s. I have an idea who the third guy in the first photo may be ... actually found him on Facebook and asked him about it.
Regarding the weird "Tanja letter" in German, wow - never expected this to turn up on this forum.
I know a lot about these, as pointed out in the first post, they were created by a lawyer's office to capitalize on gullible young men who'd be enticed to swap games with a girl. There were multiple versions of this letter, the girls had different names but I think it was always the same address. They were always written with dodgy punctuation and some deliberately mis-spelt game titles, I'm sure this was to make "the girl" appear slightly dumb and naive which in turn may have made her "victims" feel slight pity/compassion?
Once a guy wrote back with a list of games he offered to copy (or even included disks with pirated games in his response), I think he'd receive a cease-and-desist letter with a big legal fee to be paid, or he'd get a visit by the police searching the house/flat for pirated games, resulting in a fine/sentence if any such games were found. Not sure, I've only read about all this in magazines but never knew anyone personally who was involved.
I decided to translate this letter into English, only took me about 10-15 minutes anyway. I've kept all the bad punctuation/spacing to emphasize the slightly amateurish way the letter was written.
The translated letter is in this spoiler:
Hello Martin
I've found your address in Bit-Markt (this was a 80s/early 90s buying/selling classifieds magazine), thought let's write,maybe we can swap programs or just borrow to each other and then copy.
As I've never done such a thing by mail,you'd have to explain it to me in your first letter,so that I can also send you some of my programs.
I'll just go ahead,my name is Tanja and I'm almost 16 years old. I'm ca.170cm tall and weigh 65 kilograms.
My hobbies are:Dancing every Friday and sometimes Saturday depends on the mood of my parents,because if they are in a bad mood I have to be home on the weekend at 21.30 instead of 23.00,then there is no point in going dancing,right?Apart from other things I like going for a stroll and computing passionately.
Now about my games for the PC.
Tell me don't you also sometimes feel,that a computer,takes all the money out of one's purse?They want 7.00DM for a few labels and then there's only 25 pieces in the package.I already receive less than I am entitled to at my age,because me as a smoker have to make do with 50.00DM a month,pretty steep,eh?
So much about me,now my list:
Label program,Escape,Flood,Grand Prix (original),Lotus Turbo Challenge,
Donald Duck, Asterrix , Atomino , Hardball, Grand Monster Slam , Kane , Kick off 2 , Mad Nurse , One on One , Highlander , Hollywood Poker pro , Top Gun , Winter Games , Ultima 3 , Zorro , Two on Two , Flight Nigth,so that were my games.I could borrow them to you or copy them but then I need a few blank disks from you.
I'm searching:Sim City , Bubble Bobble , Barbarian , It s came from Dessert , Ultima 5 , The Never Ending Story and Hanse . If you have the games you can borrow them to me and will receive them back right away after I have copied them . You can also attach a photo of yourself and we can often swap games,that way I also will have games that my classmates don't have yet, in exchange I will receive new games from them that I can then send to you .
