I used to be into fractals, and the program Fractint on DOS, to be specific. I don’t and didn’t know jack about math, but I would fiddle with the numbers on the various options screens, tweaking and refining, sometimes just taking a number down .0001 or up .0001 to see the resulting change. Sometimes I would spend all day doing this, and came up with some amazing images. This was on an intel 486SX (stood for SUX, it was the 25MHz model, I think). It would take the thing three hours to generate one image, sometimes more. I grew tired of the Mandelbrot and Julia sets, but Fractint had another hundred or so fractals besides that.

I want a computer that can let me explore fractals in realtime with a joypad, at 30fps, with controls for zoom, skew, and rotate. Not to mention colorcycling. So far, it still takes a good few seconds to generate the same fractal the 486 took 3 or more hours to draw. Few more years yet before I can fly into the Mandelbrot, few more decades for the less simple fractals.