Demo or Die! You're a teen hacker, you want to impress, you demo code (1995)

Not sure if the demo scene was ever discussed at length here on HN, but it was something I grew up with. I can't prove it, but I suspect the same personalities that were drawn to it in the 80s and 90s are now being attracted to the web startups and the like. Perhaps, sadly, with more commercial motivations.

This is an article from 1995. I think this sums it up well

Demos are the last bastion of passionate, crazed, enthusiast-only programming, crafted purely for the hell of it by inspired teenagers working entirely in their spare time. The teens create jaw-dropping audiovisual effects beyond the dreams of most multimedia designers. Constantly striving to better their rivals, devotees of the demo scene cram spectacular three- or four-minute presentations onto a single 800-Kbyte floppy disk, fitting them into tiny amounts of memory. Freely spread by disk-swapping over bulletin boards and other sites on the Internet, then replayed on home computers all over the planet, each demo becomes a piece of digital graffiti, proclaiming the superiority of the gang that created it. Demos are made by the rock-and-roll groups of code.