In order to distinguish my page from many others, and prevent it from simply becoming an empty list of links (to other peoples' pages, of course), I decided to add a page for two of my favorite aspects of computing: demos and modules.
In case you're wondering what either of those terms means, here's a quick explanation. Historically (or semi-historically), people have written little programs to show off their computers' sound and graphics capability and their programming ability. For example, the programs might display a picture the author created, while simultaneously playing some music they made, scrolling text by on the screen (the way they do for movie credits, or in Star Wars), and displaying an oscilloscope for the music. More recently, demos, as they are called, have done much more complicated things: real-time "virtual reality" sequences, real-time phong shading, real-time 3-D landscapes, and more. One key aspect of a demo is that none of the sequences is stored as an animation. Instead, the program calculates the landscape, virtual reality sequence, or other material at the time it is run. Therefore, with many complex demos, you will achieve better results by running them on faster computers. (This is not unlike a game like Doom, where instead of calculating what the view from every possible point in the game would look like, the program instead generates the view while you play.
The demo "scene", as it is called, started off on earlier computers (such as the Commodore-64 and Apple ][gs), where it is still partially active today. However, since I don't have access to either of these machines, I will cover only the IBM-PC demo scene. On the IBM, large productions are usually called demos, while small productions are called intros. One other important point: To appreciate a demo, you may need to know a little bit about programming a computer. Sure, anyone can watch a demo and listen to it. However, many people, jaded by excessive TV exposure, will just sit there and yawn and wait for the demo to be over. To appreciate a demo, you need to watch it with an open mind.
Finally, demos are usually made by "groups" these days. Rather than a single person sitting down for a few weeks and hacking a demo together, a group of many people work on it. Some specialize in graphics, some in music, some in design, and some (of course) in programming, or coding.
My quick explanation of a "module" is a bit quicker. A module is a digital music file in a certain format. There are all kinds of technical characteristics associated with it, but all that you really need to know is that a module stores a set of "samples", which are the sounds of different instruments used in it. Therefore, if you want to use a bass drum in your module, you need one sound of a bass drum. A module player works by playing these "samples" at different frequencies to make music. If you want to play some of the modules below, you'll need your own module player. If you don't have one for your computer, and you have an IBM (more about this later), you can download my favorite, Inertia Player. I'm sure you just can't wait to download some demos, intros, and modules now that you've been enlightened by this explanation. Well, since this is obviously the case, go ahead and click to jump straight to my downloadable files page.