The History of the Demoscene
I stumbled across the video recording of “The Complete History of the Demoscene“, a presentation by Tamas Polgar, Author of Freax and member of the Hungarian demo group Madwizards, at the Assembly 2005 Demo party in Helsinki, Finland.Back to ASCII Art AcademyHis book was published in 2005 (it’s available at the merchandising section of my site among other gems) and the presentation happened after the book came out. The video was uploaded to Scene.org in August 2006, shortly after Assembly 2006. He also gave a presentation at Assembly 2006 called “The Art of Pixels: from sprites to Photoshop”. This and other presentations from Assembly 2006 are available at Alive.Assembly.Org.The DawnHe starts with the development of the first computers from the 1960s that were capable of displaying graphics rather than just perform mathematical calculations and return the results in text format. The first cracked software appeared on the Apple II computer at the end of the 1970s, but cracks were done by individuals who just removed the copy protection and then copied the software for friends etc. It was mostly unknown who cracked a specific program, because the cracker did not include any credits or reference that pointed to him.The Beginnings on the Commodore 64Cracking groups appeared on the Commodore 64, which was released in 1983. It was around 1985 that cracking groups started to add little programs to the cracked programs that were developed by the cracker groups themselves. Before that was it common to simply alter some text in[…]