My high school science fair project in 1989 was the Mandelbrot set, and I was using my Amiga to generate them, then some funky dot-matrix printer voodoo to get even grayscaling for the prints. I barely made the cutoff time, even though I'd spent weeks working on the project, because each possible render took at least a day, and my code had a lot of hiccups. (IIRC, everything was written in Modula-2. I need to see if I can find those old disks somewhere.)
It's funny that of all the things I'm 'jealous' of in modern tech, the thing that still blows me away is just how fast I can generate/zoom around fractal sets, just for the hell of it, on my phone. This much computing power in the palm of one's hand was inconceivable to me at the time!
One of my most enjoyable projects was writing a Mandelbrot generator for the Gameboy. It was so slow that if you wanted to fill the very low res screen you'd be the better part through your battery life. Great fun though.
It's funny that of all the things I'm 'jealous' of in modern tech, the thing that still blows me away is just how fast I can generate/zoom around fractal sets, just for the hell of it, on my phone. This much computing power in the palm of one's hand was inconceivable to me at the time!