Seeing so many names that are part of the fabric of my history, gathered together so recently, still thriving, coding, being a community (and just generally hanging out) brought back a flood of great emotions for me. I could waffle on for ever about how much the names on the scroll-texts left me aspiring to join the crowd, but it's a feeling I'm sure most if not all of us know - I know I don't need to.
I'm glad I was able to contribute my formative demo-fragments (under the name of 'Vobrien' - [https://demozoo.org/sceners/44570/] simple things compared to the proper demos) to lotek_style's demo archive - if only I'd been able to get into the scene earlier, or perhaps more accurately, if I'd been able to progress my coding faster at the time, I may have been in a position to attend the gathering. As it happens I never got to the point I could release anything in the day, as I was a solo coding youngster with limited resources, so it's fantastic to see that the group I aspired to become part of are still sharing that great sense of spirit and wonder we all had at the time.
I've said it before and I'll say it again; thank you to all of you who were part of the scene and especially to those of you who made the event I just watched happen. For every one of you I'm certain there are a dozen of me, who were working towards releasing a demo but didn't quite make it in time.
I code for a living, and to this day I strive for performance, simplicity and end-user experience above everything else. The industry has been kind to me and much of that has been down to the lessons I was taught by the crews who formulated those amazing disks I wondered at.
I'm happy to share an 'Easter egg' moment with you - last year, I was responsible for delivering a multi-million Euro project to one of the largest companies in The Netherlands. In that project, there was a requirement to filter out certain data records at a number of points in the processing pipeline and write it to a 'we couldn't process this' datafile. The naming convention for these files included a prefix of 'TEX_' to distinguish these files from everything else. I don't have to tell you the inspiration for that prefix!
/salute and may you all continue to do great things - it's so satisfying to see many names now using their coding skills for Sony, Microsoft and other huge companies, and knowing that in doing so they bring a little bit of Atari ST flavouring, even though it might be just a little bit, to those modern companies in a way that includes so well, some of my teenage history.
Thank you
PS: As you can see if you run any of the attached files, I really did have a ways to go. I wonder if I'd have got there in the end. No glory in it, but sharing as part of the aforementioned history. It's as far as I got at the time
