One of the first programs I ever wrote was a Mandelbrot renderer in GW-BASIC, on an 8086 PC with a CGA card running DOS 3.3. This wasn't in the '80s when this w

One of the first programs I ever wrote was a Mandelbrot renderer in GW-BASIC, on an 8086 PC with a CGA card running DOS 3.3. This wasn't in the '80s when this would have made sense, rather this was circa 1994 because this was literally the only computer that was available to me. Nonetheless it was mind-blowing to me. CGA had a 320x200 4-color mode. My program had a hardcoded bounding box that it would evaluate, and generate a 320x200 rendering of. I had to leave it running overnight for it to run to completion. I would set up the bounding box in the source file, start running the program, then wait until the next day for it to complete. It was awesome. Modern hardware could probably do the same thing in a few milliseconds. I'm sure it being written in GW-BASIC didn't help. :) Still, good times. That was the first thing I ever did that sort of resembled graphics programming.