Clicking on the 'Current Exchange Rates' link would bring up the box to the right in a pop-up window, which I assume Maaike had to update manually, rather than it being conveniently live-linked. Of course, a good many of those currencies no longer exist, replaced the following year by the Euro. Just see above for how complicated buying stuff from overseas could be back then, far from the modern simplicity of online sales and PayPal we all enjoy today. Ah, nostalgia certainly isn't what it used to be. Neuralgia, on the other hand..

That leads us to the 'Contact' section and the long out of date Surrey address and dead e-mails. Maaike's too, long gone. The compactly titled 'Music and Elsewhere United World Underground Bulletin Board!' link we covered back on the 3rd page. As 'Forum'. Ya know, it's the nostalgia trip in all this that gets me here. We (all of us involved in the underground that is, not talking just M&E here) managed to set up this near-global network; in a world where the internet was by no means ubiquitous, where people who could access it often did so by dialling up on a 56k modem (1MB of data would take about 3½ minutes to download at that speed), and where the idea of downloading whole CD quality albums was simply implausible. Communication wasn't simply a matter of tapping an electronic keyboard and pressing 'send', rather it involved writing a letter (on a piece of paper!), putting it in an envelope, sticking a stamp on it and walking to the local postbox. There was no social media for the diffusion of information or announcements to be made on, it all had to be done by the circulation of flyers. Somehow, an e-mail with an mp3 attachment has never quite lived up to the magic of an exotically stamped Jiffy Bag with a cassette in...