4. Old computers in the scene

Old computers in the scene

Today is the fourth lesson in the introduction to demoscene. Starting with this lesson, we will discuss the evolution of the means and content of demoscene in terms of the mediums used to create them, and in particular the computer platforms. Today is the first lesson of this unit and we would like to explore the most common types of computer platforms used to create "Oldskool demos", i.e. demos running on old computers: Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, Amiga and Atari ST.

Oldskool demos are the earliest and longest-running category in the entire demoscene, and these old computers are not only the most important computer platforms for making demos, but also the most popular and active computer platforms for retro-computing communities.

Why is the 80s so striking?

When we talk about "nostalgia culture" today, the first thing that comes to mind are the 1980s. So what made the 80s so special? A primary factor is the development and maturation of mass media technology in the 1970s, which gave individuals unprecedented control over media, especially electronic media. Some of the iconic media technologies of the late 1970s include:

• The advent of the VHS video recorder in 1976, which opened up the new media form of home video

• In 1977, the widespread success of the personal computer represented by the Apple II and the video game console represented by the Atari VCS allowed digital media to enter the home, as well as Sony's iconic Walkman, which appeared in the same year.

• In 1978, Seagate's predecessor Shugart introduced the 5.25-inch floppy disk, which became the most important storage device for computers in the 1980s, and the LaserDisc became the first commercially successful optical storage device.

This revolution in media and storage media continued into the 1980s, with the launch of the MTV channel in 1981 and the emergence of the music CD in 1982 both setting a new paradigm for the cultural industry.

Another important factor was the overall victory of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan's political alliance in the Cold War against the Soviet Union in the 1980s, China's progressive integration into the international market through reform and opening up, and the dramatic changes in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s that eventually led to the formation of a unified pop culture market worldwide. Cultural products produced by the capitalist world could be imported almost seamlessly to the former socialist countries. The 1991 "Monsters of Rock" Concert in Moscow was a landmark event of this period.

The 1980s were also a time when microcomputers were rapidly taking shape. From the humble microcomputers of the late 1970s, which could only run simple software, by the end of the 1980s personal computers were able to cover a large part of the functions commonly used in computers today.

• 1980: The VIC-1001 (or VIC-20), first introduced by Commodore in Japan, and the Sinclair ZX80 in the UK, were inexpensive computers aimed at the home market that allowed computers to start becoming commonplace in the home. Also appearing during the same period was the Seagate ST506, the first hard drive aimed at microcomputers.

• 1981: 3.5-inch floppy disks, network workstations, and the IBM PC appear.

• 1982: Commodore 64 hits the market

• 1983: Apple Lisa brings a graphical interface to desktop-level computers, along with CD-ROM drives and Microsoft Word, and Lucasfilm's computer graphics division (later to become Pixar) synthesizes the first high-resolution computer image: The Road to Point Reyes.

• 1984: IBM introduces the PC/AT and PC Jr. and Apple introduces the Macintosh, many of the legacies of these computers are carried over to today's computers, and the novel Neuromancer brings the term "cyberspace" into the public eye.

• 1985: The Nintendo's Famicom is sold in the United States under the NES name, and the Amiga 1000 computer is released in the same year, which have a profound impact on home consoles and computer games, respectively.

• 1986: Pixar was founded, IBM PC-RT became the first workstation using a RISC processor, the SCSI interface also appeared and became the standard interface for PC high-speed peripherals for quite a long time afterwards.

• 1987: The Nokia 1011 cellphone is introduced, GSM becomes the 2G mobile standard still in use today, the first computer with an ARM processor, the Acorn Archimedes, appeared, and the IBM PS/2 computer with its keyboard, mouse interface and VGA display interface, popularized a standard still in use on today's computers. HyperCard also appeared in this year, with a "Drag-and-drop" UI builder and hyperlinks among the key features it offered.

• 1988: NeXT, founded by Steve Jobs who left Apple, releases the NeXT Cube computer, the SoundBlaster 1.0 sound card appears, and the Morris worm, the first worm to spread over the Internet, also appears at this point.

• 1989: The Gameboy handheld game console and Intel 486 processor appear, chess grandmaster David Levy is defeated by Deep Thought, an artificial intelligence, and Photoshop is used to produce the James Cameron directed film The Abyss that same year.

1977: The commercially successful personal computer

Let's quickly rewind to 1977 to take a look at the personal computer triumvirate. The first commercial personal computers introduced in 1977 were relatively crude, essentially adding simple input and output circuitry to a microprocessor base. But even with the relatively simple features, the price of these computers could not be said to be affordable. I converted the prices of the three computers on the Internet through an inflation calculator, and they were basically equivalent to the prices of enthusiast-level, high-end PC hardware by today's standards.

• Commodore PET: $795, or about $3,555 today

• Apple II: $1298, about $5,800 today

• Tandy TRS-80: $599, about $2,680 today

The movie "8-Bit Generation: The Commodore Wars" had its Asian premiere at the 2017 Taipei City Urban Nomad Film Festival. The movie introduces the changes in the home computer market in the early 1980s with the Commodore as the main line. The old man in the trailer with sunglasses is Jack Tramiel, the founder of Commodore, a survivor of Auschwitz, who opened Commodore Business Machines in Toronto in 1956 to produce typewriters and calculators. In the late 1970s, North American calculator manufacturers faced strong competitive from Japanese manufacturers, which prompted Commodore to enter the personal computer industry.

As Tramiel tells in the movie trailer, IBM's impact on the personal computer business was still quite light at the time, so Commodore's main competitor was actually Apple. Of the three computers introduced in 1977, Apple had a considerable technological advantage, with the Apple II being the only one of the three earliest commercial personal computers capable of displaying color graphics, and the only one of them to support floppy drives at launch.

Also featured in this trailer are Chuck Peddle, designer of the MOS 6502 processor, and Albert Charpentier, designer of the Commodore 64 chipset, who describe the Commodore's strategy for competing with Apple: "We had to keep ability of doing audio and video that was above Apple has at that time".

Consumer computers: for the masses, not the classes

When we talk about consumer computers today, we tend to associate them with gaming capabilities, a statement that actually held true in the late 70s and early 80s. The first personal computers optimized for gaming did not come from Commodore, but Atari. The Atari 8-bit computers introduced in 1979 have a custom chipset consisting of three chips: ANTIC for 2D graphics, CTIA (GTIA/FGTIA) for TV output, and POKEY for music, keyboard and joystick. Relying on the functions provided by these three customized chips, the Atari 8-bit series became the first personal computers optimized specifically for gaming.

Although the Atari 8-bit computers were more powerful in audio and video and less expensive than the triumvirate in 1977, they were still not cheap; the Atari 400 sold for $550 and the Atari 800 for $1,000, roughly equivalent to $2,050-$3,730 today.

Some of the more modest and less expensive models on the market at this time were selling better, especially the ZX80 and ZX81 produced by Sinclair in the UK, which we mentioned in the second lesson. Although these two models only had black and white video output, they were extremely inexpensive. For the ZX81 launched in 1981, for example, the self-assembled parts were only £49.95, while the assembled machine was £69.96, equivalent to $250-$350 today. Even with today's eyes, it is quite a cheap price.

The advent of the Sinclair ZX-80 is considered a direct result of Commodore's shift to producing inexpensive home computers, as computer history writer Jimmy Maher wrote in his article "Computers for the Masses":

Commodore's transformation from a business-computer manufacturer and behind-the-scenes industry player to the king of home computing also began in 1980, when Tramiel visited London for a meeting. He saw there for the first time an odd little machine called the Sinclair ZX-80...It was sold as a semi-assembled kit, and, with just 1 K of memory and a display system so primitive that the screen went blank every time you typed on the keyboard, pretty much the bare-minimum machine that could still meet some reasonable definition of "computer." ...To succeed in the U.S. mass market Commodore would obviously need to put together something more refined than the ZX-80. It would have to be a fully assembled computer that was friendly, easy to use, and that came equipped with all of the hardware needed to hook it right up to the family television. And it would need to be at least a little more capable than the Atari VCS in the games department (to please the kids) and to have BASIC built in (to please the parents, who imagined their children getting a hand up on their future by learning about computers and how to program them).

It was in this context that the Commodore VIC-20 was born, designed to be as inexpensive a home computer as possible, but with more power than the Sinclair ZX-80. Its slogan at launch was "Computers for the masses, not the classes.

The "VIC" in the name of the VIC-20 refers to the Video Interface Chip (VIC), a graphics chip designed specifically for this computer. The VIC graphics chip supports 176×184 resolution and color display with 16 colors, but it only supports 23 lines and 22 columns of text display, which is not suitable for commercial use because it can display less text material than the Commodore PET's 25 lines and 40 columns. However, because of its cheap price of $299, or about $890 today, and its support for color display, the VIC-20 was a cost-effective gaming computer at the time, and many famous games were ported to the VIC-20, including Nintendo's Donkey Kong, which made the VIC-20 the earliest gaming platform with Nintendo's iconic game character, Mario.

Together, the Sinclair ZX80, ZX81 and Commodore VIC-20, built the foundation that allowed the demoscene to exist: bringing the ability of computer programming to home users. The Commodore VIC-20 became the world's first personal computer to sell more than a million units. Its successor, the Commodore 64, sold more than ten million units, making it the best-selling personal computer in history.

Commodore 64

The Commodore 64 was the single best-selling model of PC for the past 30 years, selling roughly 12 to 17 million units over its lifetime, depending on the caliber of the statistics, a record that was only broken in 2017 in the PC market that is more fragmented than the home console market.

The Commodore 64 looks very similar to the VIC-20, but the internal hardware has been significantly upgraded: the memory has been upgraded from 5KB in the VIC-20 to 64KB, the graphics chip has been upgraded to VIC-II, which supports a 320x200 pixel resolution, 25 rows and 40 columns of text, and offers the common hardware optimized smooth scrolling of game consoles. The SID sound chip also provides powerful programmable music functionality, and we will mention it again in the lesson on chip music afterwards.

Commodore acquired MOS Technology, the developer of the MOS 6502 microprocessor, as early as 1976. This ability to integrate vertically not only gave Commodore greater control over the product, but also provided the basis to fight the price war. Low End Mac webmaster Daniel Knight wrote an article in 2016, "The 1983 Home Computer Price War" looking back at the 1983 home computer price war.

In January 1983, Commodore reduced the wholesale price of the VIC-20 to $130...Commodore had purchased MOS Technology, which produced the popular 6502 CPU used in Apple, Atari, and Commodore computers, along with other chips. This gave Commodore the edge it needed to do to Texas Instruments in the personal computer world what TI had done to Commodore with calculators...In June 1983, Commodore slashed the Commodore 64 to $299, and some retailers sold it for as little as $199.

In just six months, the price of both the Commodore VIC-20 and Commodore 64 dropped to about $200, or $587 today. The drop in computer prices made computers widely popular among home users and created a thriving game market, with 29,000 games included on the GameBase64 web site, the vast majority of which can be downloaded and also run.

Behind this huge number of games is an extremely thriving community of enthusiasts. The C-64 Scene Database (CSDb for short) contains over 200,000 community entries in categories such as demos, cracked software, images, music, and development tools, as well as over 10,000 hobbyist groups, including members who have participated in these groups and the various works they have produced.

ZX Spectrum

Another vintage computer that appears frequently in the demoscene is the ZX81 and its successor, the ZX Spectrum. As its name "Spectrum" implies, the ZX Spectrum is a computer that supports color display. It continues the design philosophy of its two predecessors of low cost and low price, differentiating itself from its Commodore contemporaries. Consumers in the UK market were more price sensitive, so the ZX Spectrum did not have the same strong graphical and sound capabilities as the VIC-20 and Commodore 64. The Spectrum was initially introduced in two configurations with either 16KB or 48KB of memory.

Technically speaking, the ZX Spectrum significantly lagged behind its contemporaries, such as the Commodore 64 and Atari 8-bit series, but what really established the ZX Spectrum in the demoscene was the extremely low price that made it the most popular model among Central and Eastern European enthusiasts. Especially in the former socialist countries, the ZX Spectrum and its imitation models remained popular until the mid to late 90s.

In the book ZX Spectrum Demoscene, "Why Locality?" section reads.

Users in the West bought the C64 and Atari XL/XE more often, while the poorer center of Europe (including Poland and Czechoslovakia) favored the ZX Spectrum 48K series and its official licenses, mainly the Timex Computer 2048. The East, even poorer, was forced to simply copy the technology that was the cheapest and easiest to clone, so, in this case, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. This was the reason for the huge popularity of this platform in the Soviet Union, and later in Russia and post-Soviet countries. In those days (due to the use of the technology of the time), Russians were never able to clone machines such as the Commodore 64 or Atari XL/XE. Were it not for the Spectrum, the Russians might never have created such a broad movement in digital creativity. Since the second half of the 1990s, Spectrum users and demosceners later added to the PC scene and the gaming industry. So, no one is able to say what would be, if not for the specific IT boom caused by cloning the ZX Spectrum in the first half of the 1990s.

In Russia and the former Soviet Union countries, sales of improved versions of ZX Spectrum-compatible machines, like the Scorpion ZS-256 and Pentagon, continued until the late 1990s. These models often increased memory to more than 256 KB, had faster CPUs, and were supplied with Covox digital audio output or AY-3-8912 sound chips capable of supporting more sophisticated sound effects, and some models were also compatible with IDE hard drives and IBM PC-standard keyboards. From this perspective, the cloning and improvement of the ZX Spectrum in Russia and the former Soviet Union shared many of the same ideas as the Chinese "learning machine" cloning and improvement of Nintendo's Famicom. By maximizing the expansion of the cheapest and most readily available 8-bit computers in their countries, they were able to fill a gap in the market left by people with low incomes who could not afford to buy an IBM PC compatible.

In the 2000s, IBM PCs became more affordable for Eastern European residents, and ZX Spectrum compatible models gradually faded from the mainstream market, while improvements to the ZX Spectrum were carried on by the enthusiast community. The article "ZX Spectrum in the 21st Century?" details the changes in ZX Spectrum-compatible models from the 1990s to 2010.

The development of ZX Spectrum-compatible machines in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union gives us a glimpse into the diversity of computer history. Unlike the popular U.S.-centric narrative of computer history, in different countries, due to different stages of development and historical backgrounds, their computer hardware and computer culture also produce diverse styles. This is why I have long emphasized that Chinese "learning machines", especially those models that made large hardware improvements compared to the original Famicom, should have their own unique place in the computer culture.

Commodore Amiga

The most popular vintage computer in the demoscene is the Commodore Amiga, which is also the most popular model in the European retro computing community. Similar to the Atari 8-bit series, the Amiga computer also used a custom chipset consisting of three chips: AGNUS, the memory controller, DENISE, the video processor, and PAULA, the audio and input/output controller.

The Amiga computer was the first personal computer device that could achieve arcade-grade graphic effects. At the time of its release in 1985, it was the most powerful home computer on the market in terms of graphics performance and surpassed the popular 8-bit game consoles on the market at the time. In the home console market, graphics effects similar to those of the Amiga computer could not be seen until the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo.

The launch of the Amiga computer was a classic marketing example of a technology product and an important moment in the history of digital art, as Commodore invited Andy Warhol, the hottest Pop artist of the time, and Debbie Harry, the lead singer of Blondie, to the Amiga computer's launch event and to demonstrate the image processing software on Amiga Computer. Andy Warhol continued to use the Amiga computer for quite some years after the launch, and some of the digital images he created were recovered by a digital preservation team in the 2010s from the floppy disks used at the time, making it one of the major events in the field of digital art, vintage computing, and digital preservation.

In terms of technical specifications, the Amiga used the Motorola 68000 processor, which was used in many arcade machines and was the basis for its ability to approach the effects of arcade games. In terms of display capabilities, the Amiga computer's standard image mode can display 32 colors, while the display mode called "Hold-And-Modify" (HAM) can display up to 4096 colors, although this mode is more computationally intensive and therefore more suitable for displaying static images rather than animations. The audio function of Amiga was also more powerful. It supported four channels of digital audio and could play pre-recorded samples, which also brought the emergence of Tracker, which is a type of music production software based on sample/sequence process, in the following chip music lesson, I will introduce this type of music production software.

The Amiga 1000 was released in 1985 as a high-end computer with a price tag of $1295, which translates to $3260 today. The model that really made the Amiga computer popular among enthusiasts, especially teenage gamers, was the 1987 Amiga 500, which used a similar keyboard-housed design as the Commodore 64 and sold for about half the price of the Amiga 1000.

The Amiga computer has left behind many cultural symbols for multimedia enthusiasts, including the red and white colored ball. This motif came from the "Boing ball", a tech demo at the time of the Amiga's release, and has since become an iconic visual symbol in demoscene and retro computing, and has been recreated by enthusiasts with different development techniques in demonstration programs for a variety of computer platforms, from earlier 8-bit computers and game consoles to ShaderToy, an online shader development tool.

Due to the power of the Amiga, enthusiasts have created many of the most brilliant demos on it before the advent of PC 3D accelerator cards, including A Trip to Mars by TomSoft in 1990 and Enigma by Phenomena in 1991, both of which showed 3D models, shadows, and shading on the Amiga without a 3D accelerator card.

The influence of other demos developed for the Amiga is reflected in popular culture, as the 2003 Apple iPod dance silhouette commercial was noted as being very similar to the effect shown in the 1992 demo program State of the Art developed by the Spaceballs team.

Atari ST

Although Atari ST emerged as a competitor to the Commodore Amiga, it had a close relationship with Commodore founder Jack Tramiel, whose business philosophy clashed violently with early investor Irving Gould in 1984, eventually leading to Tramiel's resignation from Commodore. Tramiel resigned from Commodore and in the summer of 1984 purchased the Atari's home computer and console division from Warner, which had fallen into financial difficulties during the 1983 collapse of the game industry.

In June 1985, the Atari ST was sold with a monochrome monitor for $799.95 or a color monitor for $999.95, cheaper than both its main competitors, the Amiga and the Macintosh. For cost-containment reasons the Atari ST does not have the same powerful audio and video capabilities as the Amiga: the Atari ST only supports a palette of 16 colors out of 512, limiting the number of colors that can be included in a single screen. Its sound system uses an off-the-shelf Yamaha 2149F, a compatible model produced under license from the AY-3-8910 sound chip common on 8-bit computers.

The Atari ST computer has a limited presence in the U.S. Most North American Atari ST users are musicians who wanted to use MIDI interfaces. C-Lab Creator, the predecessor of Logic Pro, and Cubase, the music production software, were born on the Atari ST platform. With these applications, Atari ST is a very cost-effective MIDI sequencer and editing tool for small music studios. However, in Europe, especially in Germany, where exchange rate problems made the same model of computer often more expensive than it was sold in the US, the less expensive Atari ST also became more popular and was used in more scenarios such as desktop publishing and terminal emulator. Benefiting from the boom in the German demoscene, the Atari ST also saw a lot of great demos work on top.

More vintage computer platforms

The above four computers have the most abundant demo works and they the most frequently mentioned computer platforms in the demoscene: Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum were the representatives of 8-bit computers, while Amiga and Atari ST were the most important 16-bit computer platforms besides IBM PC.

However, this does not mean that other old computer platforms are not seen in the demoscene. MSX computers were once quite popular in the Dutch demoscene, and the art agency Rhizome has published an article by Finnish researcher Markku Reunanen on the Dutch MSX demoscene.

The Dutch demoscene on the MSX computer was also the earliest way for Japanese fans to get in touch with demoscene. Japanese developer yosshin4004 had published a long article last year, "デモシーン発生前の日本の情況" (Situation in Japan before the demoscene) discussed the situation when MSX demo works entered Japan:.

In the early 1990s, a group called "MSX CLUB GHQ" was active as a publisher, bringing MSX-related software from overseas to Japan and selling it on TAKERU, a software vendor. TAKERU was a software vending machine at that time, in which a floppy disk would come out when money was inserted. MSX FAN, a magazine specializing in MSX at the time, had a section called "internationalization (kokusaika)" that introduced MSX games from overseas, and introduced game software brought in by MSX CLUB GHQ. MSX CLUB GHQ also published a disk magazine called "Samurai Disks" (1992-), which included PSG Tracker and intro (a brief demo) by the overseas MSX demo team FLYING BYTES.

Most of the once popular computer models in Europe, such as Amstrad CPC, BBC Micro have a number of demos, and platforms like Texas Instruments TI-99, which never had demo works, have been rediscovered and new demos made by retro-computing enthusiasts after more than 30 years of withdrawal from the market: in 2015 enthusiasts developed xdt99, the cross-development tools for TI-99 series allowed demos to appear on TI-99 series computers for the first time in 2016, 37 years after the release of the TI-99 series in 1979.