[sliken]

Heh. I did my first on an 8088 with a companion cyrix 8087. I started in turbo pascal, writing code based on the description in Scientific American. I later added ASM for the pixel calc, carefully hand optimizing it and managed to keep all the values in the 87's stack so I wouldn't loose the precision. I think the intel x87 used 80 bits of precision, but the Cryix used 90 bits. I then wrote an EGA driver for Turbo pascal based on a description in PC Tech Journal, so I could see Mandelbrots.

I had a university account on a ultrix system, so I ported my pascal to produce 600 dpi bitmaps compressed with RLE. But the fortran libs I could find where only on the VMS system so I moved them over to convert to postscript. The 10 foot long printer in the lab usually spat out 100 pages per minute of pure ASCII stopped for a minute or two processing my 600 dpi mandelbrot. The lab attended ran over to reboot it, I pleaded my case. They waited, were amazed at the result, and everyone wanted one.

Years later fractint came out, and each version seemed to have yet another optimization to make mandelbrots faster. One fun optimization was to surf the edge of a particular depth, then keep progressing inward. Calculating only the edges of the depth changes was fun to watch.