This Incredible Animation Was Made By Code That Could Fit on a Floppy

[LiberalArkie]

http://gizmodo.com/this-incredible-animation-was-made-by-code-that-could-f-1565294456

This is no 20 GB video file, painstakingly pulled from a render farm. All of it was generated in real time by one tiny algorithm. And it's amazing.

Every Easter, the town of Saarbrücken, Germany, plays host to Revision, a demoparty where hundreds of programmers and artists get together for four days of showing off. This year, the demoscene group Mercury unveiled an incredible 64k intro called The Timeless. Since the file size is limited to 64 kilobytes, the graphics and music are all generated algorithmically in real time—this is called procedural generation.

[tridim]

1. 64k was definitely my fave back in the day, but 4k was impressive too. Remember those? Whoa!

[LiberalArkie]

4. What started it

The story behind this is that there was an article in Scientific American in the early nineties featuring Clifford Pickover's procedural computer graphic images of "alien life forms". These consisted mainly of a series of spheres along a path:

In the article, he said that these graphics were generated on special hardware, and that such images would be "impossible" on commodity PCs. Naturally, this chafed several people in the demoscene -- who set out to prove him wrong, in real-time.

[liberal N proud]

2. And half of the readers are going "what's a floppy?"

[Lochloosa]

3. My wife can answer that question

[Atman]

5. I think we have a DUzy! there!

[TupperHappy]

6. They got pills that can help with that now (nt)

[VWolf]

7. True story:

Back when I was doing grad studies, I worked with a secretary who made a rather embarrassing blunder.

Instead of typing "all the information is on the floppy disk", she typed "floppy dick" instead. Took her about 3 months to live that one down.

[DebJ]

13. Is that the meaning of your moniker? nt

[Rod Beauvex]

8. Wow. Flashback to the 1990s.

I remember watching my old Mind's Eye tapes religiously.

Got so many vibes watching this. Ahhh...memories.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

9. I still have some old disk called "Virtual Reality in the Realm of Cyberspace"....

It is a representation of a city block with curbs, sidewalks and buildings. Inside one building is a desk with an old dual floppy 286 on it and on the screen is the name of the company that did the program. This is all really early stuff. I think it's pre-polygon/pre-bitmap. Got it at a computer swap meet in the late 80s.

Keep in mind that this was back when people had EGA monitors.

[byronius]

10. This is awesome.

[dickthegrouch]

11. I so miss the music of that era

I have recordings of Visage, OMD, Mike Oldfield, et al. Chvrches (sic) is the only contemporary group to be producing music like this that I know of. I wish there were more.
Is the algorithm available? I'd love to have it creating my mood music.

[hunter]

12. For an Atari 8 bit running with 16K of memory there were demos like this:

Atari 8-bit - Ballsong

Quite a few complex Atari 800 demos were run in rotation by retailers that made the PC look boring.

Worse was the PC Jr., IBM's "home" machine, which was a hideous and expensive less able version of the PC. The PC was already a hobbled computer because IBM didn't want it competing with their more expensive machines.

The original IBM PC couldn't do anything comparable to the innovative 8 bit machines of the time. Speaker beeps and CGA graphics were just not the same.

The architects of the Atari 800 machines went on to design the Amiga. The Amiga was innovative compared to the PCs and Macs of the time, and it was the first "personal computer" with graphics good enough for television.

I've still got an Amiga fully equipped with gen-lock and all the other goodies. It was once used by a small town television broadcaster and later abandoned as trash when PCs and Macs caught up, many years later.

The "1984" themed Macintosh intro was horrible 1984 style propaganda, of the "increased" chocolate ration sort. It was flashier than the PC, sure, it had a mouse and a crisp white monitor, but that wasn't saying much.

If you ask me IBM, Apple, and Microsoft stifled innovation. The Microsoft/Apple/x86 environment is still stifling innovation. Hostile lizard aliens from outer space hoping to impede human technological progress probably couldn't have imposed anything worse on us.

Of course the "leaders" of Earth's oligarchy might as well be hostile lizard aliens. Once climate change kills a few billion of us and the oceans turn over in a fetid scum, I expect they'll remove their rubber human masks, suits and ties, to lounge naked on the patio snacking on live cockroaches.