This brings back memories of my being in high school; I'd get there in the morning, run over to our Computer Programming classroom, and load a floppy into the one Apple IIe that was connected to a color TV.
I load and run a Applesoft BASIC program that plotted the Mandelbrot set - oh...so...slowly. It's one saving grace was that it used a special ML program (something I found in Byte magazine or somewhere) which - on a machine equipped with an 80 column card (and the extra memory it afforded) would enable a high-resolution mode with access to all 16 colors.
So I'd run it - and let it plot...
By the time lunchtime came around, it would be finished, and it saved the image to the floppy. I'd then manually pick some new coordinates, and run it again to "zoom" in to an interesting area.
My last period was in that class (it was an elective, and one year I took it twice per day just to pass the time and gain an easy "A") - and by that time the new plot would be done and saved.
The next day I'd repeat it again. After about four iterations, though, it would be running too slow to finish a plot in time. So - I'd start again, and zoom in somewhere else. The teacher enjoyed it, and the other students liked seeing the pretty pictures.
Oh man, high school. Our grade 11 CS class had us developing with C# and running our projects on local Xbox 360s. Being able to target the current gen console hardware was extremely engaging.
For the final projects most of the students made simple games such as pong or breakout. But I decided to write a Mandelbrot/Julia set viewer and had to dig into writing my own shaders in HLSL? (been a few years). At the end of the day flying around the sets with a controller in real time to Jonathan Coultons "Mandelbrot Set" felt bloody amazing.
The first Mandelbrot renderer I ever used was an easter egg in Chips Challenge on the Atari Lynx. (Type in MAND as the level password and off you go!) Incredibly slow but it had me hooked. Most of my very early programming efforts on calculators or in QBasic were Mandelbrot set renderers.
These days, a fractal renderer is one of my go-to toy projects to learn a new language/environment. It pulls together basic code, graphics, GUI, file operations etc. and produces something pretty too, while giving me a feel for the speed of the environment in question.
Presumably "Machine Language" which is what we called Assembly, back when the translation between what you wrote and what the CPU actually did was pretty transparent.
The ML programming language, of course. I'm always confused when ML stands for machine learning, because I think the post will be about programming languages, but isn't.
Pretty sure it's "machine language" here. Writing ML compiler for Apple II would have been... interesting (disclaimer: I'm not actually completely familiar with either the Apple II or ML, but I have a general idea of the capabilities of both).
I load and run a Applesoft BASIC program that plotted the Mandelbrot set - oh...so...slowly. It's one saving grace was that it used a special ML program (something I found in Byte magazine or somewhere) which - on a machine equipped with an 80 column card (and the extra memory it afforded) would enable a high-resolution mode with access to all 16 colors.
So I'd run it - and let it plot...
By the time lunchtime came around, it would be finished, and it saved the image to the floppy. I'd then manually pick some new coordinates, and run it again to "zoom" in to an interesting area.
My last period was in that class (it was an elective, and one year I took it twice per day just to pass the time and gain an easy "A") - and by that time the new plot would be done and saved.
The next day I'd repeat it again. After about four iterations, though, it would be running too slow to finish a plot in time. So - I'd start again, and zoom in somewhere else. The teacher enjoyed it, and the other students liked seeing the pretty pictures.
Nobody really understood the math, though.