Wow, these bring back deep memories. I was basically weaned on a slew of Clifford Pickover's books — first his Black Holes: A Traveller's Guide and later Mazes

Wow, these bring back deep memories. I was basically weaned on a slew of Clifford Pickover's books — first his Black Holes: A Traveller's Guide and later Mazes For The Mind, The Loom Of God, Keys To Infinity, Fractal Horizons and others. I distinctly remember a vacation spent in Portugal... I can date it to summer 1996 because I remember the TV droning on about the campaign between Bill Clinton and Bon Dole (!) furiously typing in Pickover's BASIC code to QBASIC (or was it GWBASIC?) in DOS mode on my first laptop, a Cyrix 586 ACER thing made of cheap, slightly springy plastic. I was fascinated by those patterns. I remember how at first the code all seemed like incantations but how gradually I got a feel for what the various parts did, and the strange pride when I eventually located (and modified) the parts that actually represented the formula being iterated, which I then proceeded to modify, and I'd sit there staring at the slowly-emerging patterns. I'd forgotten all that. Thanks for bringing it back.