Only somewhat related, in 1986 or so computer labs at University of Pittsburgh had giant printers, like 8 feet long with a maze like paper path. They were howe

Only somewhat related, in 1986 or so computer labs at University of Pittsburgh had giant printers, like 8 feet long with a maze like paper path. They were however rather fast, something like 60-90 pages a minute. The pages being spit out was a common sound in the labs. They were however overwhelmingly used for ASCII. The first page would be your username spelled large on the first page out of ASCII. I got interested in the Mandelbrot set, wrote it in pascal from the original Scientific American article. Trick is I had no way to view it. File quotas on the campus VAX were limited, so I wrote a simple RLE compression. I looked into the Postscript standard so I could write it myself, but was somewhat horrified at the complexity. I had written PCL before. But I did find a nice Fortran library. So I wrote some Fortran to read the RLE picture file and output PostScript. Some afternoon near Xmas, I tried it out. I had no idea if it would work since I couldn't debug it, there was no postscript viewers (or graphical terminals) available. I printed the postscript file and the printers sudden page per second stopped. After a few seconds the operator jumped up and was about to reset the printer. I pleaded my case for a few minutes, the operator agreed, and a 300 DPI Mandelbrot was spit out. The operator went "Woah!", a few more people in the lab saw it and impressed. I explained what a fractal was and that you could zoom in infinitely. Several people wanted copies, so I printed them. The entire process took many minutes (pascal to generate, fortran to render, and print to print). These days you can zoom way deeper and get at least 60 FPS. Later I wrote a EGA driver in Turbo Pascal, primarily for Mandelbrot viewing and a few simple games I wrote. I was able to do so from an article in the PC Tech Journal which printed the entire EGA card spec. Later I wrote the ASM for an 8087, then a HP-730 (PA-RISC 1.0) and a small tweak for the HP-735 (PA-RISC 1.1).