Ever since I got my first glimpse of computer-generated fractals, I was hooked. The Julia and Mandelbrot sets captured my imagination, and I knew I had to make my own generator. At the time all I felt comfortable programming was a TRS-80 Colour Computer 3 , and I had a shaky knowledge of the complex numbers needed to calculate such fractals. My first attempts failed to properly render the Mandelbrot set, since I had not realized the need for an extra step. When I finally got comfortable with C, I wrote another Mandelbrot generator. You can find it at the bottom of this page . It requires a pre-Mac OS X PowerPC Mac, but has some nifty optimizations I was quite proud of at the time. However, unlike some Mandelbrot generators of the time, the optimizations still just got pixels onto the screen faster, and eschewed any larger-scale optimizations. Other programmers had used techniques such as outlining boxes in the fractal, then filling them in with the colour of the border. This made ...