The story behind this is that there was an article in Scientific American in the early nineties featuring Clifford Pickover's procedural computer graphic images of "alien life forms". These consisted mainly of a series of spheres along a path: http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/pickover/high.jpg

In the article, he said that these graphics were generated on special hardware, and that such images would be "impossible" on commodity PCs. Naturally, this chafed several people in the demoscene -- who set out to prove him wrong, in real-time.