Thanks to Zippy for letting us use his well done history of the demoscene.

The demoscene started in the early 80's when some hackers, and crackers
started enjoying making cracktro's more than they did cracking programs.
They started making them for fun, and after a while they had stopped
cracking programs, and gone over to making cracktro's full-time.
These soon turned into demos as they demonstrated the power of the computer,
and programmer. Old crack-groups started turning into demo-groups, and
thus, slowly the demo-scene emerged, as more and more hackers/crackers
joined the fun. These are our underground roots, which is the reason
that even today the demoscene is slightly underground,
allthough perfectly legal. A lot of people are proud of the scene's
background, and some are ashamed of it. I don't really mind either way,
but I definetely think it should be remembered, when we start talking
about commercial demos, sponsored demos, and stuff like that.

The first demos were made for the AppleII, and the C64, then moving on to
the Atari ST, and Amiga-machines. Now the IBM-compatible PC has become
the largest demo-format (despite it's few registers compared to the Amiga),
and there have even been a few demos for RISC-based computers.
Most of the PC-demosceners have migrated from Amiga, or started out in
the scene as PC-demosceners. If you think 3D in demos is something new,
you can also think again. The first heavy use of line-vectors was in 1990,
and shaded polygons followed a year or two later.
This is why a lot of people are tired of vectors in demos.
The demoscene started out as an allmost entirely Finnish scene,
then growing to become a Scandinavian scene. It later also included an
American scene, but they were kind of seperated from the Scandinavians.
Today with the Internet becoming so large the scene is world-wide,
and is represented, as far as I know in all continents, and a suprisingly
large amount of countries. I have heard of a South-african scene,
a Brazillian scene, and an Australian-scene in addition to the scene in
Europe and Northern-America. It is still Europe, and North America that are
the biggest parts of the scene. I'm including Scandinavia as a part of Europe.

BBS's used to be the main meeting-place for sceners,
apart from the demo-parties. With high phone-bills,
this kept the Scandinavian Scene away from the American.
This also resulted in more links to the computer-underground,
as, well, nobody likes a high phone-bill..
With the arrival of the Internet, the DemoScene truly blossomed bringing
unity to the worldwide DemoScene. Suddenly Europe layed eyes on American
demos, and America... well we all know there's nothing like seeing a
demo from Finland for the first time. There's something really strange
about Finland. For some strange reason, most demos, and demo-groups from
Finland, are amazingly good. This also helped the fact that the DemoScene
is a very anti-rasistical environment. The scene is also mostly drug-free.
Both facts are quite logical, when some of your best friends live in
other continents it's not very natural to be rasistical, and when your
hobby is using your brain to the maximum extent possible then you
don't really feel like rotting it with drugs..

You no longer had to be connected to an active scene in your country
to be a scener, neither was it nessecary to have been at
one of the big scandinavian demo-parties, all you needed was access to the
Internet. Don't get me wrong, nothing beats having a (relatively) local
DemoScene-environment. It's great to be in a demo-group, and know that
if you want to show something to the other people in your group,
it's just a short train-ride away, or that you're at least in the same
country, however, thanks to the Internet it is possible to have international
groups spread all over the world. The Internet is really, really great.
Not only because of stuff you can do with international groups, and stuff,
but also how, if you upload you programs to an FTP-server, you theoretically
have a potential audience of something like 30 million people, worldwide.

However, we are now past the days of the Internet-boom, and following
growth of the DemoScene, we have now entered into a bad period in history.
The scene is fading.. This is a fact. Less and less new young people
find out about, and decide to become a part of, the DemoScene,
and the current elite is getting snapped up by the game-development companies.
A lot of people blame this on Windows '95, and other people blame it
on the scene for not adapting to Windows '95. What most people agree upon
is that the arrival of Windows '95 has something to do with it.
What makes a lot of people start out wanting to find out more about their
machines, and perhaps start to code is fiddling around with drivers,
learning DOS-commands, making boot-disks, and getting games to work.
Windows '95 makes this all so simple. Click the icon, and the game
starts, no questions asked, no puzzled users, no new little sceners.
Some people claim that Windows '95 simply doesn't have the raw power that is
needed to run good demos. *My opinion* is that anything you can do in
Win '95 you can do faster in DOS. However the margins are getting smaller,
especially if you're using DirectX6. The thing is that DOS,
the way we know it, *is* dying, no question about it.
If this new generation of Windows-users get their eyes on demos it might
be all it takes to get them into the scene...

I'd also like to mention that in 'normal society' every decade is visibly
different from the previous, but it seems the demoscene has some sort
of compressed history, because in the demoscene every single year
is visibly different from the previous. Think about it.
Look at demos from 1994,1995,1996,1997,1998, and you'll find that every year
there are different things which the different demos have in common.
In 1994 it was really common to use 320x400 images. Sound & gfx was normally
better than code. Effects were simpler, and gfx was better. More Amiga-like.
In 1995 demos got more classy, and stylish. Code got better.
In 1996 we saw the a lot of crappy object-shows + some good slideshows.
In 1997 people started to use a *lot* of 3D.
In 1998 it's popular to do colored lights transparent objects, fancy stuff.
It is the year that Windows enters the scene,with the important tool
DirectX to lead its way.1999 has started kind of the same way,waiting to see
the most spectacular demos,hoping they come in TG99 or sooner...

The Scene History text is ® 1998 Zippy