Demoscene

The demoscene is a computer subculture that came to prominence during the rise of the 16 bit micros (the Atari ST and the Amiga), but demos first appeared during the 8-bit era on computers such as the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum.

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Demos began as software crackers' "signatures". When a cracked program was started, the cracker or his team would take credit via an increasingly impressive-looking graphical introduction called a "cracktro". The first time this appeared was on the Apple II computers in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Later, these intros evolved into their own subculture independent of cracking software. These were not initially called demos but rather letter, message, etc. Ironically, quite a few of the young talents that spent their time "coding" demos and thus gaining in-depth experience programming computer graphics later ended up working in the games industry, whose products they had initially cracked.

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The main aim of a demo is to show off superior programming, artistic and musical skills over other demo groups.

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Computer: A computer is a device or for processing information from data according to a program — a compiled list of instructions. The information to be processed may represent numbers, text, pictures, or sound, amongst many other types....

Subculture: :For the term in biology, please see Subculture (biology)....

16 bit: Prominent 16-bit processors include the Intel 8086, Motorola M68000, Intel 80286 and the WDC 65C816....