pouët.net

Demo as in contains real-time moving effects and music, and the effects done with characters.

Ivan Galetic linked Impact - In a world of ASCII in The Demoscene. Now of course the Amiga has no hardware charmode, which makes it more of a challenge. Still, all platforms are usually able to procure some form of charmode in a shell or similar.

Amiga used ANSI, C-64 used Petscii, and so on. The big difference is that the native graphics modes aren't used as the direct canvas. Droopy & Static / Rebels did some early chunky stuff on OCS, there were chunky in the form of copper demos, halfchar on C-64, Apple, Acorn and so on.

What I'm looking for is the translation of contours and intensities into characters. Which is the earliest ones on any platform? I'm guessing the 3 last ones and Spectrum are strong candidates to have one.

Link some prods! :)

I don't think the Spectrum will have many, as it doesn't have a hardware textmode either. The only pre-2000 one I can think of is Cows from 1997, and that's just a rehash of ASCII art that was presumably floating around on BBSes years earlier.

Surely there must be some early PC stuff, from the days when real graphics modes were lousy or non-existent and creative programmers were basically forced to play in textmode through lack of other options...?

StarPort ad by Future Crew from 1992

But there's probably some older stuff than that on the Commodore, Apple II or even TRS-80 at the very least on the home computers.

Well, Future Crew did Yo! before that one (1990).

But, as visy says, the first ascii "demo" must be searched back when computers hadn't big graphical capabilities.

For example, when I was a child (early 80s), I saw the "demo" of a running train made of ascii characters on a terminal at my dad's office... it had a nice green phosphor monitor :)

Yo! isn't pure charmode, they change the chars and colors. Some Sorcerers prods mebbe.

Maybe "ASCII demo" is not the right definition... textmode demo is better.

i remember some apple ii cracktros from mid/late eighties...

First I can remember is Intro 1 by Sorcerers

...on PC platform, anyway. I wasn't counting cracktros.

by no means the first but Ascii Attack by LATEX should be mentioned here.

Well, technically, all spectrum demos (and many c64 ones) are textmode..

the spectrum AFAIK doesn't have charmode, though

The first Petscii demo I remember, including effects and sound, from 1980:
Dance! - The Raindance Ceremony

TRS-80 says hi from 1979: Dancing Demon

There are tons of text mode "demos" for 1970s home computers like PET, Apple II, TRS-80, ABC80, etc. But some more obscure suggestions:

"Teletext-demo", unknown year. Extremely impressive BBC-micro animations. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOZY5bTxXyE

Soviet cat animation in text mode, 1968. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0O4mm3hXNgA

Rythmetic by Norman McLaren, 1958. Not text mode, but texty & mathemagical https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWRRAw6xzos

We collect tons of text mode (+misc) at http://t3xtm0.de if you wanna see more...

havoc: from 70s? holly crap.

goto80: awesome links are awesome!

Back to nature (1982) was probably the first PETSCII/text mode thing for a lot of people. It was one of the example programs on the 1541 service floppy disk, IIRC.

Interestingly, there have been all sorts of versions of this. One of them is two years older. That version runs on the Commodore PET, as the C64 had not been released yet. :)

Excellent :) I was mainly going for demos as in identifiable to a demogroup, which rules out all of the early stuff.

Still love you posting them, gone through a couple, great stuff for nostalgic evenings :)