Demonstration Programs are programs written by programmers who want to impress others with their ingenious use of a particular system or technology, in order to push it to its limits and do things thought impossible. Had its peak in the late 1980's when a variety of personal computers such as the Amiga and Commodore64 were popular, has lost its lustre after the world has moved to the boring Wintel world where we all have the same hardware and software anyway. (sigh)
I would rather say demo programming lost its lustre because the Wintel world DOESN'T use the same hardware. So it was not longer possible to max out the hardware to its limits, because then it wouldn't work on all machines. Plus the Windows architecture is not really appetizing as a platform. We will never see a demo that tries to push the COM+ model to the limits. /Johan