The Mandelbrot Set by A. K. Dewdney (1985 Scientific American article)

My father read the article in 1985, and promptly wrote a program that used the fancy-pants dedicated hardware of the computer vision systems he worked on at the time. I remember going into the office with him when he had to work on a weekend; he showed me how he was using something like $100k worth of parallel processing hardware to make a little gray-scale Mandelbrot set.

His first response to any new system is still to write a Mandelbrot generator. When he semi-retired from his position doing system-level C stuff a few years ago, he decided to give Java a try. He occasionally emails me video explorations of the Mandelbrot sets he has generated. I have a photographic print he made hanging up on my wall right now.

First time he tried to get them to print out one of his images, the person at the one-hour photo at Wal-Mart told him the picture was unprintable, despite multiple tries. The multiple 8x10s were retrieved from the waste basket, and my father got three for the price of one.

Wow, I read this article when I was ten years old. Later, when I had an IIc I indeed tried to code up the Mandlebrot set. I don't remember if I got it to work, but it wouldn't have been too impressive in GR or HGR.