In 1987 there was a pop-science book called “Chaos” by James Gleick that was, naturally, about chaos theory. At one point it described things like Mandelbrot/Julia sets and their ilk. There was one page that had a footnote at the bottom that described the algorithm used to generate a Mandelbrot set.

I had a PCjr, which was an 8088. Very slow, EGA graphics. 256k RAM. I did have a 20Mb hard drive, though.

I wanted to verify that algorithm, though. So I bought some books on how to program in C from Waldenbooks. After not too long I managed write a program to draw a Mandelbrot set on my PCjr. It was incredibly slow: I watched it paint each pixel, and let it run for many hours before I would get a complete set. But after much trial and error, it worked.

I was 16 years old. It was the first thing I had ever done that I was really proud of.