Re-reading the book by Arthur C. Clarke, The Ghost from the Grand Banks, made me timetravel back to my university days and my first i386 computer. Why? Because a background story in the novel is about the late 1980s Mandelbrot Fractalmania (see the book cover in the Wikipedia story!). I too have spent countless hours at the computer monitor hypnotized by the colors and endless depths of the Mandelbrot set - a shortlived but severe addiction. An addiction shared by many at the time, fed by the new notion of chaos in math but enabled by the simultaneous availablility of home computing power. Out of curiosity I Googled the name of the most popular piece of Fractal software at the time, Fractint, and to my amazement it is still being developed. Although at version 20 it still runs on DOS...
Sunday, March 04, 2007
Mandelmania Revisited
Re-reading the book by Arthur C. Clarke, The Ghost from the Grand Banks, made me timetravel back to my university days and my first i386 computer. Why? Because a background story in the novel is about the late 1980s Mandelbrot Fractalmania (see the book cover in the Wikipedia story!). I too have spent countless hours at the computer monitor hypnotized by the colors and endless depths of the Mandelbrot set - a shortlived but severe addiction. An addiction shared by many at the time, fed by the new notion of chaos in math but enabled by the simultaneous availablility of home computing power. Out of curiosity I Googled the name of the most popular piece of Fractal software at the time, Fractint, and to my amazement it is still being developed. Although at version 20 it still runs on DOS...
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