Demoscene

I know some other threads have discussed the early computers being produced in Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, off the top of my head I can think of Radio and Pentagon in Russia I believe? But these competitions today basically use the ZX spectrum platform, Amiga, etc, but the wiki article notes thehigher popularity enjoyed by demoscene in Eastern Europe

From Wikipedia:

Quote:

The demoscene is a computer art subculture that specializes in producing demos, which are non-interactive audio-visual presentations that run in real-time on a computer. The main goal of a demo is to show off programming, artistic, and musical skills.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene#History

Here are a few videos, this one is well known:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtCW-axRJV8&amp

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsg4P-e10MQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDIAE7C9uc8

Some of the demo groups take a pro-communist stance http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=cyber+punks+unity&oq=cyber+punks+unity&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_sm=3&gs_upl=204850l208330l0l241465l21l21l0l11l2l0l107l790l9.1l10l0,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzfvcTi2iq

The interesting part of demoscene is it developed out of pushing those computers further, today its a bit different, but they still put out new competitions every year. If nothing else, its a bit of a mind trip to watch. I've seen on certain games produced in the era when they would port it to Russian computers they would add things like this.

Here's an article titled A Brief History of the Russian Spectrum Demoscene http://zine.bitfellas.org/article.php?zine=14&id=6