"When we got our first computer in our childhood, none of us knew that we're going to change the world someday. Playing games and typing simple BASIC programs was intended to be fun. Swapping games with the guy next door was nothing serious. It still wasn't when we wrote our first contact letter to another guy in some other town; and finally we found ourselves in a dazzling network of contacts, great projects running around us, brilliant pieces of digital art filling our screens. This was the magic of the demoscene.

Years have passed, and our innocent childhood hobby has grown into an amazing worldwide subculture. Democoders, crackers, importers, musicians and graphists from all around the world changed the way we think about computers and the world itself, changed our life, changed us forever. We are special, we are demosceners. No outsider can possibly understand us. We are FREAX.

It all started in 1996. As a known diskmag columnist, I always wondered why nobody has ever bothered to write a long article about the history of this world, the scene as we know it. I started digging up traces of ancient times - how demos were made a decade before, how our computers were developed - and realized how rich and deep this subculture is. Even most sceners don't have an idea of its exact depth. This certainly deserves more than a mere diskmag article. I started writing a book, with the aim of covering everything ever happened. From the Commodore 64 to the Atari ST, from the Sinclair Spectrum to the PC - everything.

It is now 2005. A work of almost a decade lies in the several hundred pages which I have on my hard disk. It's vastly deeper than I ever imagined: it's not only the history of the scene, but all the ancient computers associated with it, the arithmetical routines used in demoeffects, the past and present of all freetime computer activities, and many more."

See also: Freax The Art Album, On the Edge - The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore and The Encyclopedia of Game Machines.