Demo Night History
Put Demo Night / Demosplash history here!
2017 Post-Demosplash Musing
mdille3, while digging through his mail, compiled the following on Nov 16 2017.
After my session of musing with Tim over what Demosplash has become vs. our seedling efforts, I got curious just how long we've had the nag to watch demos. Also coincidental that I'm trawling through emails, being forced to migrate from my dearly beloved cyrus email tonight. Starting way back, I think a few of us had variously dipped our toes into the demo world in general back in our DOS days. I never watched any per se, but I loved cracktro music. I know mkasick did more. I certainly forgot all about it until I saw them again at cclub. The first evidence of a Demo Night I'm seeing is fall 2005, when we made it our club intro event (preceded by a talk on Inferno Plan 9) in Wean 7500. We were just figuring out the IIgs, and didn't have an Amiga yet AFAICT. So probably just DOS, windows, and IIgs. I think we actually ran the latter two on mkasick's laptop or something (IIgs emulated via Kegs because the video output was opaque to us, and definitely no transwarp for megademo). At the time, we handled food as a communal pizza order that happened on the spot, in which everyone paid 1/N the cost, or "$1-3" to keep it simple, and we just paused when it showed up. To fill in some gaps, mkasick had the Mindcandy DVDs (not all had even come out then) that famously recorded some best-of stuff. By 2008, we were already advertising having "5 different platforms" so the insanity, and our pile of beer boxes we kept things in, was stacking high by then. In 2011, we got stupid and attempted a "full-fledged symposium we're calling Demosplash" over mid-semester break Fri/Sat advertising: Presentation of various demos from the '80s to present Talks on retrocomputing history, embedded hackery, lockpicking, & more! Graphics demo competition (write your own!) Lockpicking challenge Capture the flag hacking contest Film screening of "23", based on a true story of German hackers Retro arcade-style gaming (Atari, Commodore 64, & more) It was mainly me pushing the idea, why I'm really not sure. I think I came to observe that "wow, other people here actually think this is cool - let's put the time and money spent on collecting these machines to the best use by educating the widest audience we can." I'm not saying I regret it, but I'd definitely be much healthier and richer if I had buried the notion. In this digging, I saw that in the first year, I was asking Rolf Braun a lot of questions about this because he was heavily into demos. He pointed me to a now long forgotten directory, /afs/club/admin/demo-nite, which contains further evidence of a demo night possibly as far back as fall 2000. This slightly predated me. I don't know who else was doing it with Rolf back then, possibly aarons and/or isildur and/or bucy. It contains amusing remarks about not getting sound from Second Reality and that we lacked a Gravis Ultrasound (it's not easy! but a cakewalk compared to our insanity since). I do recall it was as early as early 2008 that I was already looking for distractions from grad school, and I think my first acquisition was either the purple Atari 800XL or the C64, both arriving proximally. I remember being very unimpressed with the C64, and it was mainly due to a curious housemate tinkering with it that we did much with it at all. Amigas were an obvious target as the Mindcandy DVDs demonstrated, but they were a scary scary thing foreign to us PC types. Keith bravely plowed into that world, arranging the purchase of our favorite A1200. Some horrible person (mkasick probably?) told me all about the ZX spectrum, and then that debacle ensued. Various accelerators and PAL variants of machines followed as we found we needed those to watch things. Man, it's been a long time. This was the 13th one I've helped organize... o.O Michael