4 ms·

Having coded some of the original fractal math research for DeVanney and Mandelbrot, watching that fractal render so many frames per second is a mind blow. We u

Having coded some of the original fractal math research for DeVanney and Mandelbrot, watching that fractal render so many frames per second is a mind blow. We used to have to wait several minutes for a single 256x256 image.

antoineMoPa 4y ago
> Having coded some of the original fractal math research for DeVanney and Mandelbrot, Really? I would love to read any story you have about this!
- bsenftner 4y ago
  I've mentioned this on HackerNews before: it was spring of '86 when the fractal research group was finally getting around to playing with the software we'd been using to create our publication images. I was a sr graphics consultant at the Boston University 3D Graphics Lab, and due to my being staff at the graphics lab my user account had unlimited processing privileges. This was necessary to get the fractal renders in any reasonable time, running on the University's IBM 3090 mainframe which the entire university used for practically everything. Not really considering the consequences, I made a short program that would generate a 256x256x256 fractal cube of sin()+cos(), which is the specific formula contribution of mine for the "Beauty of Fractals" book. Well, I should have considered the consequences: I launched the program, and immediately everyone's terminals in the graphics lab froze. Suspicious it was due to my program, I figured it would finish in a minute and everything would be okay. Someone mentioned the larger terminal room downstairs with a few hundred terminals was also frozen. Then I heard someone in the hallways shouting "who the hell is bsln5!" (my username.) In a minute the graphics labs will full of the mainframe admins shouting red faced at me to kill my process. I killed it and was immediately escorted out of the building and told I'd be in a hearing for my malicious use of the mainframe. Well, once everything was figured out, I had my unlimited processing privilege revoked, and a new policy was put in place for high compute research projects. During the evaluation it was determined if let run to completion, the program would have run for 35 years - finishing just last year.
jasonjmcghee 4y ago
Manually sliding the slider in that example is particularly fun!
cronix 4y ago
Fractint was one of the first programs I discovered with my 1990 high school graduation present, a 386sx16. It took forever. I eventually got the math coprocessor for it and was amazed at how much faster it could calculate. I made frame by frame animations with it and stitching the gif's together with the DOS version of Adobe Premiere, which was at version 1. I was lucky to have a 3.5" floppy, so it came on one less disk than the 5.25" floppy version.

antoineMoPa 4y ago

> Having coded some of the original fractal math research for DeVanney and Mandelbrot, Really? I would love to read any story you have about this!

bsenftner 4y ago
I've mentioned this on HackerNews before: it was spring of '86 when the fractal research group was finally getting around to playing with the software we'd been using to create our publication images. I was a sr graphics consultant at the Boston University 3D Graphics Lab, and due to my being staff at the graphics lab my user account had unlimited processing privileges. This was necessary to get the fractal renders in any reasonable time, running on the University's IBM 3090 mainframe which the entire university used for practically everything. Not really considering the consequences, I made a short program that would generate a 256x256x256 fractal cube of sin()+cos(), which is the specific formula contribution of mine for the "Beauty of Fractals" book. Well, I should have considered the consequences: I launched the program, and immediately everyone's terminals in the graphics lab froze. Suspicious it was due to my program, I figured it would finish in a minute and everything would be okay. Someone mentioned the larger terminal room downstairs with a few hundred terminals was also frozen. Then I heard someone in the hallways shouting "who the hell is bsln5!" (my username.) In a minute the graphics labs will full of the mainframe admins shouting red faced at me to kill my process. I killed it and was immediately escorted out of the building and told I'd be in a hearing for my malicious use of the mainframe. Well, once everything was figured out, I had my unlimited processing privilege revoked, and a new policy was put in place for high compute research projects. During the evaluation it was determined if let run to completion, the program would have run for 35 years - finishing just last year.

jasonjmcghee 4y ago

Manually sliding the slider in that example is particularly fun!

cronix 4y ago

Fractint was one of the first programs I discovered with my 1990 high school graduation present, a 386sx16. It took forever. I eventually got the math coprocessor for it and was amazed at how much faster it could calculate. I made frame by frame animations with it and stitching the gif's together with the DOS version of Adobe Premiere, which was at version 1. I was lucky to have a 3.5" floppy, so it came on one less disk than the 5.25" floppy version.