I read this as a high school student and saw a presentation on mandelbrot set around the same time. The presenter showed this equation: z = z**2 + c and explained how complex numbers worked. I went home and thought really hard- harder than I had, clearly figuring out some stuff I didn't know before (like mapping a small floating point interval to the "high-res" screen of my apple //e.
Eventually I got a working program and started it... and it didn't get very far before I had to go to bed. I didn't even know at the time whether you could leave a computer on overnight- would it overheat? But I did and woke up to... nothing. My BASIC program hadn't gotten to any of the set yet, just the bands around it. At that point, I decided I needed a faster computer and eventually upgraded to a 80286 DOS machine which I think was able to run FRACTINT. FRACTINT was a clever optimization that used integer (which was all my poor 286 could do) and a number of other tricks to speed up set rendering. It was a very useful lesson in how to optimize.
That book, and several others (K&R C, Hackers) helped expand my high school mind and point me in the direction of high performance computing, complex systems, and simulation. The butterfly effect played a huge role in my understand of classical causality.
Back then I learned C from the source files, until then I had been using a mixture of Turbo Pascal and assembler. Later that led to C++, which was the base language for a large part of my freelance career. Nice to be reminded of it again.
I wonder how hard it would be to get this running in pcjs so it just runs automatically in a browser. I spent hundreds of hours playing with it in the early 90s.
That book, and several others (K&R C, Hackers) helped expand my high school mind and point me in the direction of high performance computing, complex systems, and simulation. The butterfly effect played a huge role in my understand of classical causality.