

Demo or Die! You're a teen hacker, you want to impress, you demo code (1995) - arn
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.07/democoders_pr.html

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arn
Not sure if the demo scene was ever discussed at length here on HN, but it was
something I grew up with. I can't prove it, but I suspect the same
personalities that were drawn to it in the 80s and 90s are now being attracted
to the web startups and the like. Perhaps, sadly, with more commercial
motivations.

This is an article from 1995. I think this sums it up well

 _Demos are the last bastion of passionate, crazed, enthusiast-only
programming, crafted purely for the hell of it by inspired teenagers working
entirely in their spare time. The teens create jaw-dropping audiovisual
effects beyond the dreams of most multimedia designers. Constantly striving to
better their rivals, devotees of the demo scene cram spectacular three- or
four-minute presentations onto a single 800-Kbyte floppy disk, fitting them
into tiny amounts of memory. Freely spread by disk-swapping over bulletin
boards and other sites on the Internet, then replayed on home computers all
over the planet, each demo becomes a piece of digital graffiti, proclaiming
the superiority of the gang that created it. Demos are made by the rock-and-
roll groups of code._

