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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 ! S1.gif

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 S4.gif.

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.

Boite alice32.jpg

So I started to learn Basic (as written on the box S1.gif) 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. S4.gif 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 propably would ask an artist to model and rig the dog, and I would either ask an animator to animate the dog or I would code a procedural dog animation so I don't bother to animate the thing myself but hey ! You have to start with something !


The early demo days : the Atari ST

Time to move to the PC