DemoNews

By Adok/Hugi

DemoNews was a newsletter published by the maintainers of the Hornet archive (USA). The first issue was from September 24th, 1992. It was edited by Dan Wright aka Pallbearer.

Originally DemoNews was just a list of new demos and other productions uploaded to the Hornet archive. It was released about once a week. Sometimes there were also some comments inside the newsletter, e.g. in #24 Dan Wright commented on Future Crew still not having released Second Reality more than two months after the party at which it was presented. Starting with issue 52, which was the first issue larger than 20 kbytes, there were also small articles and interviews inside DemoNews (not in all issues though).

In issue 70, Christopher G. Mann aka Snowman took over coordinating the Hornet archive and publishing DemoNews. This issue was the first to be larger than 40 kbytes and had several music-related articles as well as a coding corner. Music and coding remained two regular sections of DemoNews. DemoNews #77 and #78 were the first issues with more than 100 kbytes of text, but the magazine became smaller again and only the very last issues were more than 100 kb again.

People interviewed in DemoNews were, among others, Gore of Future Crew, Purple Motion of Future Crew, C.C.Catch of Renaissance, Leviathan of Renaissance, Mosaic of Renaissance, Mellow-D, Jugi of Complex, Zodiac of Cascada, GooRoo of KFMF, Basehead and Jeffrey Lim.

From time to time there were also various reviews and reports about the scene in various, more or less exotic countries, e.g. South Africa, Japan and Switzerland.

For a while after #87, DemoNews was split into three newsletters: one for the list of new files, another for articles and a third one for "informal" jokes. But this was given up after five issues, and the split newsletters were re-released as issues of DemoNews afterwards.

The last issue of DemoNews was #150. It was released on February 4th, 1998. The number of subscribers was about 2400. At its peak time, DemoNews had a bit more than 2600 subscribers. All issues of DemoNews can be downloaded from scene.org, from where most of the issues have been downloaded around 600 times. The 150 issues of DemoNews together are 5001 kbytes of text, so even if a lot of this space is consumed by the list of new demos, there's still plenty to read to spend one or two evenings with.

Adok/Hugi