Check out these funky, retro videos from the early days of home computing.

In the early days of home computers, the idea of opening up your PC to add more memory or a new graphics card was unheard of. Computers were solid-state devices with no variance between them. However, there were far more companies releasing their own hardware platforms – besides the DOS-based IBM PCs, companies like Commodore, Texas Instruments, and Atari also had home computers.

One interesting outgrowth of these primordial days was what are called “demo videos” – non-interactive programs created by hobbyists and basement coders that explored the primitive hardware of these machines to wring sound and visuals from their chips that commercial programmers would have found impossible. The “demoscene” was composed of relentless explorers, constantly pushing these early computers to their limits, and the programs they created (and are still creating!) are awesome historical artifacts. Demo competitions still exist today, with bold retronauts continuing to teach these old dogs new tricks. Here are five of our favorites.

Deus Ex Machina

The Commodore 64, while reasonably popular in the United States, was an incredibly dominant hardware platform in most of Western Europe throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s. General consensus seems to posit the C-64 as the first system with an active demoscene, with existing demos dating back to 1985. The C-64 was notable for demos because many graphical effects that were thought impossible were unlocked by demo coders before making their way into commercial products. The Crest group was responsible for many of these advancements, and their Deus Ex Machina video is an excellent example.

Watch Deus Ex Machina here.

Robotic Liberation

The Commodore VIC-20 is probably the least powerful computer to support a demoscene group, with a paltry 5120 bytes of RAM available and a maximum disk capacity of 16KB. However, enterprising coders did manage to wring some astonishing effects out of the predecessor to the more powerful Commodore 64, including Robotic Liberation, a rare demo with a narrative. Watch as marauding robots take over the Earth set to the tune of a thumping techno soundtrack.

Watch Robotic Liberation here.

Binary Love

In Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the dominant home computer for much of the 1980s was the dimly-remembered ZX Spectrum. Capable of a higher pixel resolution than some of its competitors, the graphics capabilities of the machine were hobbled by the ability to only display fifteen colors, with some unique and bizarre quirks. Demos for the Spectrum were typically distributed on cassette tape, and usually feature more emphasis on hi-res bitmaps. This 1997 demo from Digital Reality features a bubbly soundtrack, tons of weird imagery, and anti-Windows 95 propaganda to boot.

Watch Binary Love here.

A Poem to a Horse

The Commodore Amiga was the European company’s last stab at keeping pace with the hardware advances of the day, and many of the software and hardware developed for it, such as Video Toaster, laid the groundwork for today’s computer-assisted video and graphics programs. Like its younger brothers, the Amiga also has a rich and robust demo scene that continues to impress. A Poem to a Horse is a demo by Farbrausch, a German group who have released a number of strange, beautiful demos featuring graphical effects that push the Amiga to their limits. Amazingly enough, most of their demos fit in a 64KB file, astonishingly small for their complexity and quality.

Watch A Poem to a Horse here.

Second Reality

As the IBM PC began to dominate its competitors, the demoscene began to shrink. With dedicated graphics cards, what ran on one PC may not run on another, limiting the reach of demo programmers’ work. However, some programmers soldiered on by creating demos that were still far beyond what commercial software of the day was accomplishing. One of the most famous of those is Second Reality by Finnish group Future Crew. In 1993, this demo was unbelievable – running on a primitive 286, it features 3D effects, raytracing, voxels and many other techniques. Unfortunately, it’s nearly impossible to run the program on a current computer, as many aspects of the program will only work on the primitive hardware of the time.

Watch Second Reality here.

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