[mreid]

As someone who taught myself 68000 assembler as a kid in order to render Mandelbrot and Julia sets quickly it still blows my mind a little that fairly hi-res versions of these can be rendered basically instantaneously in a browser using an interpreted language.

[gerdesj]

Similar(ish) although I only really got as far as BASIC on a 80286 running DOS 3.something!

I did manage to get something in C to compile and work with hard coded co-ordinates but it took me ages and didn't float my boat but it was rather faster 8) I suppose I'll always be a scripter.

I had a copy of the "Beauty of Fractals" and the next one too (can't remember the name). I worked in a books warehouse as a holiday job before Poly (UK Polytechnic - Plymouth) and I think I persuaded my parents to buy me the first and the second may have fallen off a shelf and ended up in the rejects bin. I got several text books for Civil Engineering too, without even needing to cough drop them myself.

One of the books had pseudo code functions throughout which even I could manage to turn into BASIC code. I remember first seeing a fern leaf being generated by a less than one screen (VGA) program which used an Iterated Function System (IFS) and I think a starter matrix with carefully chosen parameters.

Nowadays we have rather more hardware ...

[mreid]

I also had to convince my parents to buy me books about fractals. My prized possession as a 15 year old was a copy of Mandelbrot's "Fractal Geometry of Nature". A lot of it went over my head but it had some gorgeous colour plates and interesting sections. I still have it at home some 35 years later.

That also inspired me to write IFS code for ferns, Sierpinski gaskets, and Menger sponges in 68k assembler (after realizing AmigaBASIC was too slow).

[bongodongobob]

Ha, same. I remember setting Fractint to render something and hoping it would be done when I got back from school.

[progmetaldev]

I spent many hours experimenting with Fractint, trying to get the inner and outer coloring just right, along with the zoom magnification that I could handle walking away from the computer for long enough to get something interesting. The worst was zooming somewhere that looked interesting, and coming back many hours later to find out you had nothing of value.

I spent my early teen years addicted to Fractint, before I could even really show off my creations except in person to my friends. I still look back at those days as more interesting with computers than now. Maybe I need to go back and write my own software to render fractals (or work on existing fractal software and see if I can improve it). In the mid-2000's, I was using GnoFract4D to render fractals, and the results were far more impressive. A change in GNOME or Ubuntu created an issue with the render window for me, and I ended up abandoning it.

[bravesoul2]

It might be JITed not interpreted though