I find the Mandlebrot set both fascinating and slightly existentially terrifying, in a way I can't quite put my finger on. Perhaps the way some people feel when swimming in water when they can't see the bottom.
The sense of infinity becomes more prevalent when looking at the image and all the tendrils stretching out. For the same reason, the idea that those tendrils trace back to the main body via infinitely thin channels always gives me the willies. A mandelbrot image makes me recall a statement someone once made about how not only is the universe strange, it's even stranger than we can imagine.
You too? I've always found it and other fractals disturbing in an undefined way. Maybe like a feeling of an infinite evil that persists in spite of me knowing it's just math.
Anyway, I first generated Mandlebrot sets in 1981 on an Ohio Scientific Challenger 1, printed out on an ASR33 via a homebrew current loop interface. <kerchunk>
That is the first mention of a Challenger 1 I’ve seen in quite a long time. My parents bought my older brother a Challenger 1p around 1978 and I learned to program on it. That thing was literally a tank. My brother had soldered on a joystick controller and hooked up our Sears pong paddle controller to it and showed me how to PEEK at the right address to read the value. It felt like magic to a 7 year old.
I still have it in my lab, right next to a PDP-11/05. I don't think I have a composite input monitor or NTSC TV around anymore to use as a display. I could rig something up.
