jkh@MEEPMEEP.PCS.COM (Jordan K. Hubbard) (04/24/91)
I think everybody here is missing a fundamental point.. If you look at half these demos, especially some of the more inspired ones, you'll see that they all come from places like Pferdpiss, Germany or Sangteate, Belgium, where there is (and it's a matter of public record) ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do. When the nearest "fun" consists of a 6 hour trip to Brussels or Kiel (either of which is only marginally less boring), one tends to go for more introverted activities. Since things like Amigas and Amiga magazines are still relatively available, even in such remote locales, they tend to be a viable alternative. Contrast this with your average Podunk, Iowa family which is about 110 miles from ANYTHING, much less a computer store, and you'll see that the equivalant uptapped talent in the U.S. doesn't have the same advantages (or perhaps even the same education, but let's not get into that). In the U.S., you either have everything so concentrated that one suffers an embarassment of riches for a variety of things to do (which is perhaps why California teenagers are as jaded as they are), or you've got 1000 acres of corn to look at and not much else. In Europe, you have two factors working together: 1. Things can be remote without losing all touch with civilization (I.E. even the smallest villages often sport a computer / electronics store - I've seen Amigas in some strange places). 2. Even in the best of cases one has to travel fairly far to find anything even remotely on-par with the average California town in terms of sheer variety of things to do. Even here in Munich, which is one of Europe's bigger cities, one is still unable to get a pizza after midnight. The number of late night ( > 2am) restaurants can be counted on one hand. People move so slowly that they are frequently mistaken for dead. And this is *the big city*. Imagine what life is like a couple of rungs down the latter (town-wise) and you no longer have to wonder why so many demos are being written! What *else* is there to do? This is getting more sociological than technical, so I'll leave it at that. Jordan --- PCS Computer Systeme GmbH, Munich, Germany UUCP: ..!pyramid!pcsbst!jkh EUNET: ..!unido!pcsbst!jkh ARPA: jkh@meepmeep.pcs.com or jkh@violet.berkeley.edu