Introduction

I grew up in the 1980s and was surrounded by computers almost from the beginning. We lived in Hungary behind the iron curtain and were really lucky as it was extraordinary if someone had a PC at home. Only a few of my classmates heard about computers at all, let alone saw one. We had a Commodore VIC-20 and I started to program at the age of 10. A dream came true when I got my Commodore 64 in 1991.

By the end of the 1980s the C64 became the de facto gaming machine amongst my friends. Games came mostly from pirated sources with the demo screens of warez groups offering unlimited lives, invulnerability and infinite ammo. Those were completely different times...

But things had changed, and the Commodore and ZX Spectrum machines phased out as everyone switched to IBM PCs. It started with the XTs and ATs, monochrome and CGA displays, and later more advanced machines. By the time I got to secondary school in 1994, the school had one or two Pentium machines as well.

I often find myself nostalgic about those times and decided to learn more about the details of the ancient machines.

What could be a better project than a Mandelbrot drawer? It's visual, looks great, everyone knows it, and it's complex enough (pun intended).

I plan to implement it on various platforms. Right now I have a C64 and an x86 version. I want to travel back some more to the PDP-1 or IBM 1401 era, or even to the ENIAC, but we will see how it goes...