pouët.net

Otherwise, we'd need to find the first cracktro that's not a cracktro but exists for its own sake. I don't think this can possibly be nailed down to one specific prod. It's likely that this trend emerged at multiple places at the same time.

But seriously.

but SIRiously

According to Grendel/Byterapers the first party with a proper democompo with known and downloadable results was the Byterapers-party in august 1988. (Skrolli Magazine, 2018.3)

that establishes a baseline. anything earlier?

@jco The Spectrum demo I mentioned earlier beats that by a year. :-)

Looking from the other direction, I don't think anything pre-1985 on CSDb fits the criteria. Colorgirls looked promising for a while, being a non-game release from multiple people with handles ("Clever & Smart"), who resurfaced later in the 80s with at least one demo that actually called itself a demo and can be linked by group affiliations to the current demoscene. But, on closer inspection, Clever & Smart were only the crackers, so that still doesn't establish a demoscene link to the person or people who actually created it. It does vaguely back up 4mat's hunch that the earliest demos are probably graphic/music rips, though.

The Jezebels is quite an interesting multiparter by The Jezebel's Union from 1987. The union practically consisted of all the finnish groups and sceners of its time. Here's a fact sheet. It mentions "cracker/swapper-union", but some of the members were already more into demomaking.

There were older stuff already in first thread, like The Judges (no cracks at all) 1001 Crew, FCG (with 1985 intro/demo) etc. Mostly being also cracking groups, yes, but otherwise meeting criterias.

Demos were sometimes called demos already in 1986:

Good contribution, and yes there's nothing wrong with the helpful contributions in the old thread I linked either, it just got closed as reaction to a spammer.

If I were not platform agnostic but an Amiga fanboi, I'd jump on the (IMO) incorrect release date of Boing, and Amiga would be leading. But the criteria are there for a reason, and I think it rightfully disqualifies it as the First Demoscene Demo.

So. I think we have established that we can go as far back as 85/86 on C64, and we now need an earlier demo on C64 or another platform like the BBC to beat it.

For me, it was when I realized that other teenagers were playing with the hardware and building reputation from standalone demos with effects that I even knew there was such a thing as the Demoscene.

So if I were egocentric I would dismiss the static screens on previous platforms and shout Bamiga Sector One!! Or Defjam or Thorax or ... but that kind of attitude doesn't meet the criteria, so instead it's the attitude that must be dismissed.

So, Ratt with his C64 Beverly Hills Cop release from 1985 is a candidate, then?

wertstahl, link it!

A similar question was asked on Facebook today: roughly, "Do demos come from cracktros?"

I think it does, and this made me think about Apple II. Why don't we find demoscene demos on Apple II, which certainly had cracktros?

Could it be that Apple II had more serious older computer people, and later platforms got competitive teens?

So that if you impressed with code on Apple II, it ended up on the Apple Club mailing list/PD and not in a cracktro?

And on later platforms instead the first code/music/gfx impressive cracktro inspired groups to compete also in this? Knowing teen boys; wanting to be cool, wanting to belong; my gang is better than your gang? (Crudely, pissing contest. :D)

Example: Something like the demo I chose for this article (as in, this would have impressed me compared to what I had seen; make me wait before clicking onto the game)?

Canonically, I think Douglas Engelbart's so-called "The Mother of all demos" predates the so-called demoscene, but we wouldn't have one without the other.

Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad would also predate even that, but I think videos of it are very reminiscent of demos and informative.

The Amiga Boing Ball from 1984 I think largely kicked off the hobby PC demo scene into 3D animation, but I recall cracktros and such prior to that as well, albeit I did not even own a modem at that time, and most of my 1337 knowledge was learned via friends who were children in military households in California in the 1970s and 1980s where a lot of technology was being developed and hacker and counter culture were definitively a bit different than publicly documented.

It's not an interesting question. It's a vague and subjective opinion because nobody except a small group of people who started to coin the term demoscene back then (late 70s or early-midst 80s). I don't even know if "demoscene" was a word in late 70s. But maybe midst 80s it began? My hunch is that the so-called demoscene must have started some time when copy-parties began to advertise demo competitions at their parties. Or even on mailing lists and bbs'es. Im also quite sure they showed crack intros and trainers which inspired them to make own graphical demonstrations as logos, effects and so on. This was before the PC demoscene, and probably in the era when tapes and 5 1/4 inch diskettes where the big thing to store information.

word=term

Wasn't the boing ball demo created to promote the Amiga commercially? Does that count as demoscene?

rudi, from this I don't think you understand the question fully. At least it's not as loaded as I think some think it is.

Simply: at some point, we started competing not in releasing others' work, but our own. (And also, for fun and to say hello.)

Either way, our own releases started getting spread on their own merit, as the original post states. Specifically, we started making our own releases for them to be spread on their own merit.

The demoscene was started on some platform at some point, and this is the search for it.

One interesting conclusion so far is that even though Apple II was early, and had cracktros, it didn't birth the demoscene.

Opinion has been carefully removed to leave only logical criteria that will yield a prod chained to the demoscene we are now in. The links in the chain are demosceners.

Photon: Yes, I did not answer the original question because I dont have an answer. I only give my own personal opinion. For example I think the first cracktro or trainer that I saw was either from a dutch C64 group or from Fairlight which is the one I recognize the most for the music and sine-waving rasterbar: https://csdb.dk/release/?id=53390

The platform I would bet on is C64. Because it's cracking business was very active. I don't even know if Trainer intros came before Cracktros, but I think they did. And I saw many of those back in midst 80s. Figuring things out as times go by will just get worse because information will get deleted/removed, changed or something like this. Asking other types of questions might get you on the right track if thats the purpose behind those questions. I was probably a bit to late, and my memories from that time is a little vague. Maybe I wasnt even born yet. But as I understand you are _NOT_ looking for the first Trainer Intro, Cracktro or even Intro. But the first DEMO. By the time I saw this first Trainer Intro I never saw a demo until middle or late 80s as I said. I think its still a blurry thing to figure out since its so long ago, well 30+ years!
Someone might have just written the term "demo" instead of "demonstration" just to skip the "nstration" bytes in a textfile or something. wild guess. So my question is who coined the term "demo" first, and what demo was it? on what platform.. etc.. I think thats almost what you're asking?

...and the reason I say I bet on C64 when it's cracking/training scene was active - is due to that I personally would LINK "coding and cracking" into that of producing the first so-called demo. But as I said its just a guess and bet and I have no proof :p

If we talk about the origins of the demo scene we simply can't neglect what people in the 70ies did with analog video equipment.

Sadly, my previous posts in this thread have been deleted and apparently I've been considered "collateral damage" in yet another cracktro scene fight (I'm not part of that).

Check out this video for example Computer Image Corporation 1975 Demo Reel

Kids in the 80ies grew up with these kind of visuals and naturally tried to copy them on their home computers.

And here we are, ~40..50 years later.

let's dissect it back to the first photon... not only would the thread starter get a semi, it is also as semi-related to the demoscene as every mentioned early attempt in CG without having a clear relation to doing a 'demo' as-is.

Just take a look at the interviews with the people who were at the forefront of things back then, experimenting with new technology, you'll recognize the spirit (you should, IMHO).

Well, I see some early demolike effects in this video :)

I think one problem I have with putting in the '60s-'70s work is intent. Because as ground breaking as something like the Minskytron or early CG is the impetus behind it doesn't really appear the same as what the demoscene was motivated by. There is documented evidence that some demos were inspired by that work, but the demoscene was also just as inspired by movies, tv and games. Especially games.

The other problem is the original rules (and apologies if this has changed) were stating that it had to be a demoscene group only, whereas I don't think you can seperate cracking and demoscene groups out in that early (84-86) era. A group would release, say, a music hack at the same time as a few games, yet if you look at the music hack in isolation you'd say that was a demoscene product.

Otherwise you're looking at that mid-1985 point where Compunet and computer clubs were producing work inspired by the sub culture, and again there was a lot of crossover in those anyway as far as I can tell.

The intent of those 70ies TV commercials in the video above clearly was to "wow" the audience with starfields, logo/text effects, and trippy images/animations in general.

The TV landscape and computer graphics technology has changed a lot since then, of course.
Commercials became less hippy-trippy stylewise, and CGI gradually became virtually indistinguishable from real video recordings.

This late 60ies and 70ies eras was a time when technology was evolving rapidly, and noone knew how far it really could be pushed.

They just let the engineers / operators experiment and basically let them do what they like (unlike nowadays, where art directors and designers know about the possibilities and instruct the engineers and pixelpushers what to do exactly).

The demo scene has also become quite professional nowadays (which is no surprise in regard of what some of the people here are doing for a living)
but it still has this same "experimental" and "trippy" attitude (at least more often than not).

I mean, just look at it, some of those clips could even stem from a 90ies or even 21st century demo.

Yes, but "wow" was coupled with assuming some background technical from the viewer, as well as the content being focused inwards towards the demo sub-culture rather than expecting to be public facing. There's a lot of more 'behind the scenes', personal viewpoints and direct commentary content in demos than in other media. Certainly in those years where sub-text, unified design, basic flow or narrative weren't even considered as a part of the experience. (and in all honesty for a demo they're not even required now for a demo to work) I've always found it a much rawer and unique medium with it's own rules and aspirations, trying to apply the rules of other mediums to it doesn't really work for me at least.