[mangamadaiyan]

Wow, the Mandelbrot set example really put things into perspective.

Unoptimized code would easily take tens of minutes to render the Mandelbrot in 640x480x256 on a 486. FractInt (written by Ken Shirriff) was fast, but would still take tens of seconds, if not longer -- my memory is a little hazy on this count.

[ErroneousBosh]

Around that time I worked in a shop that had an Amstrad 2386 as one of our demo machines - the flagship of what was really quite a budget computer range, with a 386DX20 and a whopping 8MB of RAM (ordered with an upgrade from the base spec 4MB, but we didn't spring for the full 16MB because that would just be ridiculous).

Fractint ran blindingly fast on that compared to pretty much everything else we had at the time, and again it could show it on a 640x480x256 colour screen. We kept it round the back and only showed it to our most serious customers, and our Fractint-loving mates who came round after hours to play with it.

It still took all night to render a Lyapunov set.