Its incredible to think the shape was only discovered in the last few years and not earlier in computing history (80s/90s or earlier). Just goes to show there is still much to be discovered.
Heh, dunno, seems kinda obvious to me. I was fascinated by the Mandelbrot set, and had read the original description in scientific american. I wrote an implementation in turbo pascal for a CGA display. After my dad bought an EVGA I wrote the first (to my knowledge) EGA driver for turbo pascal based on the hardware description in PC tech Journal.
A few years later I was at U Pitt and rendered a Mandelbrot zoom at 300 dpi in postscript. The big lab printer that normally printed ASCII only (mostly homework assignments). A print kept the normally 100 page/minute printer busy for a minute or two. I begged the lab attendant to not reset the printer. Everyone in the room was amazed when it printed out. Printed a few dozen out for people to pin up on walls.
I wrote some hand assembly for the x87 (and managed to keep the calculations on the stack at 80bit precision). Later on I did similar in PA-risc assembly, even participated in one of the first distributed computing projects, to map the area of the Mandelbrot set. 2 mathematicians argued that the higher resolution maps would asymptotically approach some number and a higher precision area would settle that.
I was working at Pittsburgh Super Computing (PSC) in the 90s as a student. I was working under Joel Welling who was working on an implementation of the marching cubes algorithm. So I needed a 3D dataset to tinker with. I tinkered a bit with how to get different 3D slices (I forget what tweak I used for the Z axis). Submitted a job to calculate a 256^3 volume, used the marching cubes algorithm, and rendered it. The result looked pretty similar to the current mandelbulb, granted at a pretty low resolution.
sliken|4 years ago
A few years later I was at U Pitt and rendered a Mandelbrot zoom at 300 dpi in postscript. The big lab printer that normally printed ASCII only (mostly homework assignments). A print kept the normally 100 page/minute printer busy for a minute or two. I begged the lab attendant to not reset the printer. Everyone in the room was amazed when it printed out. Printed a few dozen out for people to pin up on walls.
I wrote some hand assembly for the x87 (and managed to keep the calculations on the stack at 80bit precision). Later on I did similar in PA-risc assembly, even participated in one of the first distributed computing projects, to map the area of the Mandelbrot set. 2 mathematicians argued that the higher resolution maps would asymptotically approach some number and a higher precision area would settle that.
I was working at Pittsburgh Super Computing (PSC) in the 90s as a student. I was working under Joel Welling who was working on an implementation of the marching cubes algorithm. So I needed a 3D dataset to tinker with. I tinkered a bit with how to get different 3D slices (I forget what tweak I used for the Z axis). Submitted a job to calculate a 256^3 volume, used the marching cubes algorithm, and rendered it. The result looked pretty similar to the current mandelbulb, granted at a pretty low resolution.