I read that one way back when it came out, and it inspired many all night computer sesseon my IBM XT clone hoping my little script would produce a fractal on the screen by morning. He makes the concepts so accessible and inviting. Great writer.
The Information is available as an audiobook too - nice for a long car ride.
Yup! In all its monochrome amber screen glory. It was an excuse to learn some coding, and to learn about fractals. I’d do a Mandelbrot set one night, then each night a different Julia set. I’d tweak the iterations and the function logic to see what came out. In the morning, it’d either have worked or not. It the power glitched, it was game over. I wasn’t a very sophisticated coder then.
I did a Sierpiński triangle once (I forget the algorithm, but, it had to do with drawing a random point and then another halfway between it and the previous (?) then iterate. I need to look it up - it’s been almost 40yrs…!
Actually attempting to code the stuff was absolutely an eye opener and I learned lot.
Audiobooks are awesome. We live in the Golden Age (at least as far as that is concerned…).