There is a breakdown of this demo on youtube, it's roughly ~2 hours. They explained how they made this demo. Really interesting to watch.
Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhqT0DhV9yE
Breakdown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFIyj5Yv440
It's interesting that the demo scene is very Windows/DOS focused, unlike other hacker scenes. Linux or Mac demos are basically not a thing. You're far more likely to see C64 or Amiga demos.
Back in the day we wanted to have the cool demos at the parties to show off how we managed to do something that others deemed impossible.
Part of the challenge is to match what others did and out win them, without having access to how they achieved it in first place.
Older Macs were never a thing in Europe given how expensive their were, Comodore, Atari and Sinclair machines ruled Europe.
While UNIX and demos never were a thing, those were more the domain of cracking competitions. Trying to gain access to some random university server.