I’ve been a computer guy for a long time now, but I’ve been enjoying Christmas even longer.
I got my first computer, a TI-99/4A, on Christmas morning, 1982. I was 10 years old, and from that Christmas on, it was games and hardware I wanted Santa to leave me under the tree. On through my teenage years, part of my ritual for getting into the Christmas spirit and enjoying the holidays was downloading and watching Christmas demos on whatever system I had at the time (and every platform out there had a few of them).
Enjoying these demos is a personal tradition that I had, sadly, long left behind until last Christmas when I was inspired to seek out one of the demos I remember best, Audio Light’s 1985 musical slideshow for the Atari ST. With the help of an emulator, I captured it to share online with readers.
Here, a year later, I recently brought it up and watched it run through it’s pixellated images and 3-voice musical holiday greeting. As I watched, it occurred to me that it might be nice to gather a few of the other demos I remember from those good ole’ days and present them here, in order to perhaps share some of the holiday cheer that they used to inspire within me.
I remember the Sierra On-Line demo quite well. I have a very vivid memory of watching it on my dad’s CAD workstation, with a (then) enormous 17″ (?) monitor. All I wanted for Christmas was a R2R ladder Covox Speech Thing. 🙂
Even more demos over at BYTECellar — check ’em out!
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