2. Computer hobbyist communities in Europe

Today is the second lesson of the Introduction to the Demoscene: The European Computer Enthusiast Community. While the demoscene is a global scene, its core community is primarily located in Europe. So naturally we have the question, why did the demoscene arise and flourish more in Europe? What does the foundation of its community look like? How does it relate to the history of computing?

The personal computer revolution didn't just happen in America

In today's mainstream presentations of the history of computing, the personal computer revolution is often presented in a simplified way as something that happened in the United States, or even more crudely, as the Homebrew Computer Club, the startup stories of Apple and Microsoft. But we as researchers need to know that the personal computer revolution did not just happen in the United States, and the events that had a significant impact did not just happen between Microsoft and Apple.

On the website of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, United States, we can see two of the earliest personal computers: What Was The First PC?

One is the Kenbak-1, which appeared in 1971, a machine that predates the earliest microprocessor, the Intel 4004, and therefore it did not use a microprocessor. The first PC with a microprocessor appeared in France in 1973, when the French R2E (Réalisations et Etudes Electroniques) started selling a microcomputer called Micral for industrial measurement and other purposes, and one of its main designer was André Truong Trong Thi, a Vietnamese-French engineer.

This example shows that the personal computer revolution is a global event, with different processes and paths in different countries. So when we think about the past of the computer community, we need to look at it more broadly, especially today when the narrative of computer history is so strong, centered on the United States. As a Chinese person, or more broadly, as an Asian person, it is right to have a greater interest and understanding of other narratives of computer history.

Computer Kits

Let's take a look back to Europe, where in the late 1970s a large part of the European computer enthusiast community's practice revolved around homebrew computer kits. Computer kits were also an important element in the history of computers in the United States, such as the Apple I, which was sold as an kit.

One of the easiest Computer kits produced in Europe to find information on is the British-made Science of Cambridge MK14, which was the predecessor of the later hugely popular Sinclair ZX series of computers, and another is the Acorn System 1, also from Britain, whose developer, Acorn Computers, was the original developer of the ARM processors that are now popular on mobile devices such as smartphones and VR headsets.

Computer kits have remained the "underpinning" of the British computing community to this day, and it was the founder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, Eben Upton, who was inspired by the Acorn System 1's successor, the BBC Micro, to set up the Raspberry Pi project.

At the time, computer kits were significantly less expensive than commodity microcomputers, with the Science of Cambridge MK14 selling for £40 at the time and the Acorn System 1 for £65, machines like the Apple II or Commodore PET costing significantly more in the same period. The price of the Apple II in 1977 was $1,298, which was roughly £753 at the exchange rate at the time (one dollar to £0.58), while the price of the Commodore PET was $795, or £465. So kit computers were much more price-friendly to hobbyists in the late 1970s than commodity computers.

Luxor ABC 80 and "Big Board" computers

In addition to importing U.S.-made commercial computers, some Western European countries also developed their own commercial computers in the late 1970s. One of the more influential models was the Dataindustrier AB Luxor ABC 80, named after the Advanced BASIC Computer for the 1980s, which sold for 6,000 Swedish kronor, or about $1,300 to $1,400, similar to the price of the Apple II. As its name describes, its primary operating environment was the BASIC interpreter.

As today, American-made microprocessors had a huge lead in the global market, and the ABC 80 used the Zilog Z80 processor, which was also used in the Radio Shark TRS-80, which was also sold in the American computer market in the late 1970s, along with the Apple II and Commodore PET. In addition to the ABC80 computer produced in Sweden, the Budapesti Rádiótechnikai Gyár was also authorized to produce a compatible model called RBG ABC80 in Hungary.

Hobbyist-oriented kit computers like the MK14 or Acorn System 1 relied mainly on numeric keyboards and LEDs for input and output, and required additional accessories if they were expected to support video displays, while commodity computers like the ABC80 were a bit more expensive, even though they worked right out of the box. Therefore, in the late 70s there are some more powerful DIY kits, which can be assembled like many commercial computers directly connected to a TV set. Their prices are higher than the aforementioned "small boards", but significantly lower than contemporary commercial personal computers. This type of computers is sometimes called "big-board computer", and representative models include the NASCOM 1 and Compukit UK101.

Computer Club

Along with the increase of computer enthusiasts, computer clubs have become active in some European countries, and some of them have been active since the 1970s until today. The Amateur Computer Club - ACC (UK), founded in 1973, was one of the early active computer clubs in Europe. Its newsletter, Amateur Computer Club Newsletter (ACCN), provides an excellent historical look at the early computer community.

At the beginning of the first issue of ACCN in 1973, there is an article called "Old computers never die", which tells the origin of computer enthusiasts who urban treasure hunting from E-wastes for re-usable components.

Going to the sale led me to wonder what happens to all the old machines. Most digital computers seem to have a maximum useful life of about 10 years, or less if they are leased. Some do, of course, end up being sold as scrap or donated to the local school; but I suspect that a large number, especially those on lease, are just destroyed. This seems a terrible waste and surely there must be a way some of this 'junk' could be ligitemately diverted to peaceful amateur use.

In 1973, the Micral, the first microprocessor personal computer mentioned earlier, had just been introduced, and most hobbyists still had access to the mainframe computers they encountered at school and at work. So in the opinion of hobbyists at the time, reuse of old computers retired by large organizations was the most feasible way for hobbyists to obtain their own computers. By 1975 and 1976, one would find magazines with less content about mainframes and more about microprocessors, such as the Intel 8008, Motorola 6800, etc. Occasionally, one would see large sections of source code written in BASIC or ALGOL 60 language in the magazines.

Inspired by the British Amateur Computer Club, Dutch hobbyists founded the Hobby Computer Club (HCC) in 1978, which operated more successfully than the ACC in the UK. Unlike ACC, which gradually disbanded in the mid-1980s and was succeeded by smaller clubs around the British, HCC as a whole has been active for over 40 years and still has tens of thousands of active members today, and its PC-Active magazine, acquired in 2013, is the largest computer magazine in circulation in the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg (Benelux).

Another more famous computer club is the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) in Germany, which was also founded early, in 1981. CCC's most important current topics are technical and social issues in the hacking releated field, such as surveillance, privacy, freedom of information, hacktivism, and data security, among others. Because of its focus on hacking, CCC is also closely associated with the cryptography community in many places, participating in supporting or organizing "CryptoParty". Its focus is on topics in the field of cryptographic communication, such as email encryption and peer-to-peer communication protocols like I2P or Freenet, rather than cryptocurrencies, which have become a hot topic in recent years. Many important hardware cracks have also been achieved by CCC members, such as the copying of cellphone SIM cards in 1998, the cracking of Apple's Touch ID in 2013 and the cracking of the Samsung Galaxy S8 iris recognition in 2017, among others.

The emergence of cheap home computers

In the early 80s, two cheap home computers designed in the UK significantly changed the computer ecosystem in the UK and throughout Western Europe: one was Acorn's BBC Micro and the other was the Sinclair ZX series. We have already mentioned in the previous section the two computer kits they each developed, the Acorn System 1 and the Science of Cambridge MK14, so these also count as successors to the computer kits.

The Sinclair ZX80 and ZX81, released in 1980 and 1981 respectively, were two computers designed entirely for home users. While American microcomputers of the same period, such as the Commodore PET and Apple II, still had the business market as their main target, the ZX80 and ZX81 were marketed solely to the home user, both in terms of features and price.

The ZX81 and ZX80 are close in configuration, both based on the Z80 processor, and both having only 1KB of pre-installed memory. However, the ZX81 improves on some of the ZX80's obvious shortcomings. For example, the ZX81 does not have the problem of flickering screens when pressing buttons like on the ZX80, and it adds a more powerful BASIC language interpreter that can support floating point numbers. The ZX81 is also cheaper than the ZX80 because it uses uncommitted logic arrays (ULA) instead of a series of discrete components on the ZX80. The price of the individual components in kit form has been reduced from £79.95 to £49.95, while the whole unit has also been reduced from £99.95 to £69.95.

In the movie "From Bedroom to Billion Dollar Industry", British game developer Mark Eyles credits the ZX81 with creating the concept of the "bedroom coder"; Rich Eddy, a game media personality active since the 1980s, credits the ZX81 with allowing kids to create their own contents on TV; Raffaele Cecco, a game developer, mentioned that the ZX81's hardware was modest, with only 1KB of memory, but his experiments started with a simple function like "let subtitle A fly across the screen". Martin Hollis mentioned that he once tried to create a maze on the screen using square characters, and as the number of lines displayed grew, memory ran out. Developing larger programs often required installing memory extension modules. This spirit of challenging hardware limitations and creating and experimenting can be said to form the basis of the British game development and computer enthusiast community.

Another important British-made home computer was the BBC Micro, which, as its name suggests, emerged inextricably from a BBC television program, the BBC Computer Literacy Project. In line with this program, the BBC solicited design proposals from several British manufacturers, and Acorn's proposal was finally selected and sold under the name BBC Micro, and appeared in the TV program as a teaching computer.

From Bedrooms to Billions also has a clip featuring British game developers' impressions of the BBC Micro. David Braben mentioned that the BBC Micro could deploy software to an entire classroom of computers with a single command, making it ideal for use in schools, while Jez San mentioned that the BBC Micro's BASIC interpreter was very powerful and could mix BASIC code with assembly code, allowing hobbyists to learn more in-depth programming by gradually using assembly code instead of BASIC code; and Geoff Crammond described similar practices to ZX81, where moving graphics around the screen is the starting point for programming attempts.

Compared to the UK, other countries in Europe do not have strong local models like the Sinclair ZX series or the BBC Micro. The computer market is fragmented, and in addition to computers from brands like Apple, Commodore, Tandy, and Atari in the US, and Sinclair in the UK, you can also see many models from Asian manufacturers, such as VTech Laser series, Comx-35 and Lambda 8300, all of them are made in Hong Kong and once popular in mainland China; Little Professor II, produced by Acer in Taiwan; and Sharp's MZ-700 and Sord M5 in Japan, among others. This fragmentation, or diversity, is also a fundamental feature of the European computer enthusiast community.

Computer magazines

In the 1980s, computer magazines also played an important role in the European computer enthusiast community. Many computer magazines published code lists of computer games, which inspired teenagers to learn computer programming in order to play games. Occasional typographical errors in the magazines forced young people to try to debug and correct the programs themselves, furthering the spread of computer programming and game design among young people.

Video game books featuring game code also appeared in the 1980s, with Usborne books publishing a series of books containing game code lists, often containing both an introduction to the game's plot and gameplay, as well as the basics of computer programming and complete program code for a variety of computer platforms. The entire book contains numerous illustrations and is a very avant-garde practice that combines game design and computer science knowledge and teaches it to youngsters.

Due to the limitations of code complexity and computer performance, the games published through the code list are often text-based and look rather rudimentary today, but the ideas of game design and computer knowledge they contain within them profoundly inspired the hobbyists of the time, especially teenage computer enthusiasts.

As Oliver Twins, the founders of British game developer Codemasters, recounted in "From Bedrooms to Billions" teenagers who didn't have enough money to buy games, or couldn't buy good enough games, would develop them themselves. These teenagers, who made their own games at home, came to be known as bedroom coders/bedroom programmers. The games developed by the "bedroom coders" were sometimes copied free of charge to friends and family, and sometimes sold by mail order in magazines. Later, a series of specialized software publishers emerged in the UK, which bought the rights to distribute games from bedroom coders and then sold them on a large scale.

This tradition of the "bedroom coders" makes a clear cultural difference between European video game players and the highly commercialized regions of the United States and Japan, where players look up to game developers as opposed to the United States and Japan, where game development is generally considered to be a high threshold, professional job. For a long time in Europe, gamers have been looking at game developers in a flattering light, because your neighbor might be a "bedroom coder" who developed the game that sold so well on the market.

It's not hard to imagine what happens when the bedroom coders and the computer club tradition come together: a non-commercial community of computer enthusiasts with a preference for games and graphics programming, and all the conditions for the formation of the demoscene are now in place.

Behind the Iron Curtain

Let's move from Western Europe to Eastern Europe to see what was happening on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Computers become popular in Eastern Europe much later than in Western Europe, largely due to the Cold War. Microprocessors were first introduced in the U.S., but were restricted from export to the socialist countries of Eastern Europe because of their potential military use.

When we look back at this history, we often mention the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls, an informal international organization that included 17 developed countries including the US, UK, France, West Germany and Japan, mainly to restrict technology exports to socialist countries, and China was one of the countries whose exports were restricted at that time. The easier way to be able to obtain computers in China was to import them as educational equipment through Hong Kong, which was the reason that enabled VTech Laser 310 to spread to a small extent in mainland China.

The spread of computers in Eastern Europe is at least 7-8 years slower than in Western Europe due to more difficult access to microprocessors, but the paths are quite similar: both started with hobbyist computer kits. Probably the most famous hobbyist computer in the socialist camp in Eastern Europe is the Galaksija in Yugoslavia. In the early 1980s, Yugoslavia residents could only import goods duty-free for 50 German marks, which made it virtually impossible to buy any commodity personal computer, which would have cost two to three times the original price after taxes had gone through normal imports. A small number of Yugoslavia residents were also able to obtain home computers through smuggling channels.

In 1984, Yugoslavian inventor Voja Antonić designed the Galaksija computer and published the design in the magazine Računari u vašoj kući ("Computer in your home"), and eventually about 8,000 enthusiasts ordered the parts to assemble the Galaksija computer from Antonić, making the Galaksija one of the most important products in the process of computer popularization in Yugoslavia.

After 1991, Yugoslavia experienced many years of war. As a result, its computer community disappeared from view for a while, but in the 2000s, and especially after 2010, we have seen a resurgence of computer communities in former Yugoslav countries such as Serbia and Croatia. Since 2013, the Balkan Computer Congress (BalCCon) has been held for several years and shows how much local enthusiasts value the heritage of their computer communities.

In 2011, Serbian enthusiasts Dušan Grujić and Dragan Toroman realized an FPGA replica of Galaksija, and in 2012 Tomaž Šolc replaced the 74LC chips in the original Galaksija with the newer 74HC chips and designed the CMOS Galaksija. Similar to the Western European community, the Eastern European computer hobbyist community also shows a high level of technical skill and a do-it-yourself hacker spirit.

Another important computer used in the socialist countries of Eastern Europe was the East German KC-85, which used an East German copy of the Z80 processor, and German developer Andre Weissflog was developed an open source emulator of the computer and posted it on Github, as well as Github pages to introduce more technical details of the KC-85 series computers.

On the whole, Eastern European computers are not as well documented as Western Europe, and much of the content is scattered in documents in different languages, which creates some additional obstacles to understanding the content.

Summary

To summarize, we will find that the early European microcomputer culture is characterized by a profound DIY component. Popular video games in Europe were often homemade, as there were no heyday game giants like Atari in Europe. The NES entered Europe in 1986, and the home console market in Europe was only really established after the Sega Genesis (released in Europe in 1990) and Super Nintendo SNES (released in Europe in 1992) in the 1990s. The European game industry was comparatively less industrialized, and the practice of homebrew attracted a large number of teenagers to learn computer programming and created a unique cultural landscape of bedroom programmers.

In Europe, computer clubs played an important role as centers of information exchange and event initiation for the technical community. Computer clubs in different regions have the cultural overtones of the countries in which they are rooted, but their geographical proximity allows them to interact quite closely. The localized, folkloric exchanges in the context of the East-West confrontation during the Cold War made the European computer enthusiast community even more diverse.