Back in the early days of the Personal Computer there were a lot less things you could do with your unbelievably expensive "toy". You could play some of the games of the day but until Doom came along they were pretty lame....at least graphically. I don't think that anyone under the age of 30 can really appreciate just how far the graphics power of the PC has evolved in the last 15 years.
Circa 1992 the most amazing thing that you could run on your computer was a Demo. Today a Demo is typically a free version of software that you download to get an idea about how that software works. But back in the day the term "Demo" meant a program that you could run that was an amazing feat of programming featuring crazy graphics and bumping techno music. Here's my favorite from the legendary programming group, Future Crew....the title is Unreal.
That's right, 15 years ago we stood around a computer mesmerized by what is basically the visualizer from iTunes or Windows Media Player. But at the time this shit was amazing.
This art form still exists today in the form of Assembly, basically a continuation of the old Demoscene led by old members of Future Crew. Every summer they host a conference and give out awards for various Demoscene competitions. Check out the winner of the Assembly 2008 demo competition called Within Epsilon.
This has also spawned an entire genre of "pre-visualized" music videos where programmers take a song and render an amazing visual ballet to accompany it. Here's my absolute favorite called Solar by a programmer called flight404....
Solar, with lyrics. from flight404 on Vimeo.
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