Literally (literally literally, not figuratively literally) every time I see the word "demoscene" after not seeing it for a few days, I think it's the name of a geologic age, like pleistocene.
I wrote demos some while back (~ 1990 -> 1998 roughly).
They were running on the hardware of that time (including specific soundcards like the Gravis UltraSound), using modified DOS modes etc.
As years passed, it became difficult to run them, because the hardware was harder to find.
Ultimately I wasn't able to watch my own creations anymore!
At some point though, I discovered DOSBox (the emulator). But running it on the available hardware in say 2005 would not give anything good!
So I had to wait more years until technology improved (good enough to ensure the emulation would run fast & without too many glitches, but also fast enough so that video can be captured decently), until 2019 roughly, when some friend from back then captured my own work on their brand new PC (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVwesW3PSwg).
How did those two words get mushed together for this, anyway? Nobody talks about the hackingscene, or javascene, or gamescene, or magicscene (the trading card game), or baseballscene, or anything else like that.
It came from the warez or cracking scene, often just called "the scene" [1]. I don't know where the name came from, but the demoscene is definitely a (legal) spinoff of the (illegal) warez scene.
> Demos in the demoscene sense began as software crackers' "signatures", that is, crack screens and crack intros attached to software whose copy protection was removed.
You may notice that many demoscene groups have the same name as warez groups, this is not a coincidence as they were originally the same people. All part of "the scene".
Might be my bias showing, but I just assumed that demo scene stuff mainly developed in Europe, and at least in German, referring to a hackingscene[1], or javascene[2], or gamescene[3], or magicscene[4] wouldn't feel out of place at all either.
I don't have a definite answer. It might be a mixture of analogies to other creative "scenes" (music / cinema), it might have been improved by the fact most competitions were later projected on large screens etc!
https://www.dwitter.net/ is a codegolfing community around a JS-based shim with a 140 bytes limit (or 194 with some unicode conversion-deconversion trickery).
Ah, Demoscene, my favorite of the Ancient Greek philosophers, who once wrote, 'In the realm of pixels and sound, true wisdom lies, not in what is seen, but in what is rendered in the mind's eye.' He was quite ahead of his time as you can see.
The page is outdated. It shows Breakpoint in the parties section, which was shut down more than a decade ago. New popular parties like Revision aren't mentioned. Many links are dead. Exercise caution :)
2004 might be correct. It mentions Breakpoint, the demo party I had been the main organizer of, which last ran in 2010. So any case, this site hasn't been updated since 2010.
Honestly it's probably just that demoscene minded people see the word and click because of nostalgia and belonging. You'd rather upvote this than an AI link or something about ventures. It's part of our identity :)
There's not much to discuss about this submission, but here's a twitch link to the talk from Andreas Fredriksson today at Handmade Seattle. It's about some of the approaches they took to make their absolutely incredible Eon demo for original Amiga 500 hardware.
And in case you ever wish to experience a demo party yourself, here is an always up-to-date list of upcoming parties around the globe.
(Yes, these days there are a lot of streaming-only parties, and that's very nice, but no, this is nowhere comparable of being actually part of the fun on-site. So leave your sofa and go to the real thing, please.)
And yes, the US demoscene sadly is pretty much dead for a couple of decades now (with a couple of EU sceners getting exported there from time to time).
Most recently at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37927344