Demos

A long time ago, I used to be a demomaker...

The beginning

I fell in love with computers at an early age, I was about 6 or 7 I believe and already the computer science club in my small town near Nancy caught my interest. It was 1982 and there were only early Thomson computers and Commodore Pet's. That was AWESOME !

I dreamt about great computer hackers I could see in movies like Tron, WarGames or even Short Circuit. Now I realize they were total crap but I still watch them with emotion as I remember these days .

At the age of 9, my parents finally managed to gather enough money to buy me a computer for Christmas, it was a Matra Alice 90. I believe it's something that existed only in France, as many other computers at that time : small companies could build entire brands that only a hundred of people would buy worldwide. Some brands had more success than others like Amstrad, Apple, Atari, Commodore, Sinclair but many were forgotten. Anyway, the Alice 90 was sold in a nice big red plastic suitcase so you could take it anywhere. The package design was (I realized later, to my great surprise) made by the famous artist Jean Giraud a.k.a. Moëbius.

You would't believe it if I told you that computer had a cassette recorder to load and save programs for which you had to set the volume level to the exact right value or else, the data would get completely scrambled and the loading/saving would fail ! Yes ! You actually had to spend about 10 minutes tweaking the recording/playing level of the cassette recorder to manage to load a program ! It was a real cassette recorder, the guys at Matra didn't even bother to build a special purpose recorder and just used a normal one painted red so it matches the central unit.

So I started to learn Basic (as written on the box ) and my first program ever (discarding the obvious "Hello World !") was already something graphical : I made a frame by frame animation of a dog walking on a scrolling sidewalk, getting by a lamppost, stopping, raising its back leg and... well... pissing on the lamppost. Come on ! Cut me some slack here ! I was only 9 ! Huhu. Anyway, I still remember the notebook with the little squares I drew to make the dog sprite. Now I would probably ask an artist to model the dog, and I would either ask an animator to rig and animate the dog mesh or I would code a procedural dog animation so I don't bother to animate the thing myself !

Evolving

I think I kept programming the Alice until I was 12 but I was also closely monitoring what other computers could do and I was drooling on the ever growing amount of colors of the Amstrad 6128