> the pretense that the cutting edge equipment of a specific time is somehow the measure of art and what came after is “just not that interesting” is difficult

> the pretense that the cutting edge equipment of a specific time is somehow the measure of art and what came after is “just not that interesting” is difficult to stomach. Nobody meant that C64 demos are the measure of all art, or that things done today aren’t interesting. It seems like you’re taking what @Ekaros said out of context and making big assumptions and projecting them and making yourself unhappy. Demos on old hardware are a measure of demo scene demo art, not of art in general. That’s what the comments here are saying. The point of demo scene is pulling clever tricks in a very constrained environment, so doing the very same demos in the browser, as was suggested at the top, misses the entire point. It would be very easy to do, wouldn’t push the hardware, and it’s relatively bad art compared to what you can do in the browser, so it would be totally boring. In the context of C64 software, these demos are difficult to make, push the hardware beyond it’s design, and are aesthetically much better and/or more interesting than the relative ‘cave paintings’ people were actually making on C64s in the 90s. There are, however, other kinds of demos done in the browser today (see for example ShaderToy.com) and they pull other tricks with a similar mentality, of having artificial constraints and seeing what you can do within those constraints. There’s tons and tons of great digital art made on modern hardware that can be appreciated in it’s own context. The context is what makes C64 demos interesting, which is why changing the context makes it less interesting, and why calling it names is unfair and demonstrates a misunderstanding on your part.