Hacker News Reader

I first saw arvid in action while my dad and I visited his mate to copy some software and games onto floppy disks. That guy had a BBS station that time with files sharing enabled. Some of that files were available for downloading straightaway and some were required 'a pre-order' so he had to recover it from the VHS tape first and then place online as I understood later. Downloading with 2400Bps modem was a torture and my dad said 'hey, I know that guy personally, let's go and grab all the files you need..' Regarding the purchase. At the time I lived in a large industrial city 1000km south of Moscow and there we had several resellers in town (small computer hardware retail firms mostly) not sure if it was official or not. Another purchase option was the so called 'radio market' a weekend event where people met to exchange,sell or buy computer software and hardware parts. So yep, there were no official ads or whatever and mostly it was a 'word of mouth' among techies as you mentioned it.

Radio markets more or less exist in US too, they are called "Flea Markets". They are not as narrowly focused on selling electronics, but Soviet "radio markets" too, were usually adducts to normal flea markets, selling old glassware, clothes and other random crap.

I didn't own one, but in Russia at the time it was fairly common knowledge among techies that these things existed, so mostly word of mouth.

I guess the answer would be "Fido"[1].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet