Sitting and thinking. About raindrop patterns on the window. Crenulated cloud edges, silver where they pass over the sun. Kinda reminded me of fractals, so I googled for “fractal viewer” or something, and downloaded the first one I saw – Fractal Explorer. Wow! Suddenly its 1985 again…
Somewhere, I’ve got a set of 5?” disks containing a lot of Mandelbrot set image files that I generated on one of my school’s BBC Micros in about 1984-85. I remember staying late after school to write the viewer software in BBC Basic. Even at the low screen resolutions that we had back then, it took ages to run. If you made a mistake in entering the i/j coordinates incorrectly, you’d come back half an hour later to find a blank screen, or something uninteresting.So I hit on the idea of rendering the image using progressively higher levels of detail – calculating z for four evenly-spaced points and drawing four big squares with the appropriate colour, then repeatedly subdividing each square until I got down to pixel-resolution. This at least let you see what was happening, and cancel a bad run, but the program probably ran slower as a result.
I remember I really enjoyed doing that. It all felt fresh and new. Ah, those were the days…
I’m almost tempted to get hold of a 5?” drive, but its extremely unlikely that the disks are still readable after fifteen-plus years.