pouët.net

I recently bought the Tron DVD.
I watched the bonus disc a little and while looking at the computer graphics making-of, i saw something which was certainly one of the first demos.
It's a 3D balls curve rotating to form a tunnel which was looking like the dots-tunnels you can see in many demos, then the camera is moving in tunnel.
Along with the funk music which was played (hey isn't it a Moby tune ? ;D), it was looking so familiar !!!
And this animation is dating from middle 70's ... :)

please, take the vob file, and do a divx for us, we need to see that :)
but imho it's not realtime, so it's most a Wild or 3Danim than a Demo ;)

IMHO :
the first public demo(s) ever was Altaïr Led and musical demos in the 70's :)
the first private demos was little things made on big systems in the 50's and 60's, on oscillograph screen (electron beam analogik).

scene started on apple ][

Wasn't it on the altair?

demos - maybe.
scene - i guess not.. not scene as we know it. scientists scene.

http://www.lza.lv


science 451

To Zone :

Yep you're right, it's certainly not realtime in fact. :)
but the style of the animation is typicaly demoscene stuff. ;)

the first thing the altair ever did, =) da da da da

haha, scientists scene, the real freak scene! XD

John Whitney Sr. was making digitally created abstract films as early as 1965, working with a research grant at IBM. The images were mathematically created dot patterns, printed to film in monochrome and hand-colored. I recall seeing a documentary where he was working on these films using a very primitive CRT and a lightpen, and I got the impression that the system could preview the motion in realtime, so maybe these really were the first demos.

Of course the funny thing is that the Whitney films were and are much better than most demos :)
But this guy really was a genius, he made some absolutely amazing abstract films with an "analog computer" (a kind of mechanical film printer) before going digital, and is also the original inventor of the slit-scan technique used for the 2001 final sequence.

saffron: yes, that's all very nice, but did he wack it all into a boot block, greet all his mates, slag off another group of 'lamahs', and have a scroller that details what exactly the coder is having for lunch?

To Saffron : Oh he's the one who made the marvelous 2001 sequence ! I love it. :)

To Factory : Do not reply and leave the topic clean if you're not interested man.

first demo: "Tanz der Farben" by Hans Fischinger, 1939 (yes, thirtynine!). or even before that "Kreise" by Oscar Fischinger or even better "Komposition in Blau".

the latter featured some real-world raytracing (using mirrors, you know), 3d-bar-equalizers and perfect music sync. but i prefer "Tanz der Farben" because it's more advanced. "Kreise" has the first plasma-tunnel, as far as i know. "Kreise" is from 1933 and was filmed in "gaspar-color".

analouge, can you please update your "submit demo" options to year-numbers starting 1920?

Woh, it would be damn interesting to see those. :)

one could say the first demo ever was the big bang (urknall), but unfortunately no one recorded it for later usage ;)=

to chaos^fr: where do i get explicit information about 'tanz der farben' and 'kreise'?

stuff produced by analogue video synth can also
be considered as a form of demomaking (most disco
videoeffects for example were made with them + as well
as pre-cgi "sci-fi" commercials)

http://www.audiovisualizers.com/toolshak/vsynths.htm

i've got a cd with old german commercials, those films mentioned by chaos are on them. i guess it's out of print though.

http://www.uni-trier.de/~agnm/abel/werbung.html

if the films aren't copyrighted anymore i could upload them perhaps :)

chaos, Oskar Fischinger is indeed the granddaddy of them all, but I assumed we'd only count digitally created stuff here :)

if anyone has digitized videos of Fischinger or Whitney works, please let me know... I've heard a compilation of their work was released on laserdisc, but sadly there doesn't seem to be anything available on dvd so far.

knos, thanks for the interesting link!

Hah, you think it's tough holding demo parties now, try during the nazi regime ("alternative film clubs"). A snippet from http://www.chapman.edu/animation/Moritz.html:

Only one of these people seems to have been able to leave the country. Oskar Fischinger emigrated in February 1936, but he made three of his best films in Germany during the Nazi era: Circles (Kreise, 1933), Muratti Gets in the Act (Muratti Greift Ein, 1934), and Composition in Blue. He also made several other films, and was denied the right to make a color abstract film Squares (Quadrate, 1934). Circles and Composition in Blue were made in defiance of the Nazi policy on "degenerate art" and only released with some danger and some difficulty, involving the heroic cooperation of a number of sympathetic, anti-Nazi critics, especially those centered around Dr. AnschŸtz's Color-Music Congress in Hamburg (there were four: 1927, 1930, 1933, and 1936), and the Waterloo Theater in Hamburg, which managed to keep an "alternate" film club open until they hosted the 1939 premiere of Hans Fischinger's abstract animation Dance of the Colors (Tanz der Farben).

For the history buffs, I also found a chronology of animations at http://www.public.iastate.edu/~rllew/chronst.html.. though no pictures, and you'll have to sift through all the cartoons. :)

Very interesting and funny. Write an article for a PC diskmag! :)

P.S. I know the answer ;)

Marvin Minsky, the AI guy from MIT, made a demo on the PDP-1 in the early 60's. It consisted of three dots which swirled around to make patterns and shapes and stuff.

Some other students took the basic code and turned it into "Space War," which is generally considered to be the first video game.

if anyone got some of Fischingers work in full length and good quality, well, i just have to get it. my recordings are lousy, incomplete and off sync.

this stuff really blew my head when i first saw it. actually the only thing that really changed is the music, there simply was no techno back in those days. (but fischinger experimented with painting saw-waves on the audio-track of the movie-clip to generate synthetic tones). the lack of computing power was compensated by hard work and lot's of ink.

ph34r these guys... They were tracking chiptunes in '64... on large IBM printers...

mot: whoa, cool as fuck.

ROFLMAO that is so insanely cool! :D

moT : funny this thing, music with a matrix printer :) follow the link provided by moT, you can DL some printer's made musics in mp3!
the 1403_blue_danube.mp3 is very very excellent !!!

the altaïr led demo explained in a 2.6Mb mpg video : http://www.oldskool.org/demos/FirstDemoEver.mpg