Mandelzoom

Mandelzoom is an implementation of a program described by A.K. Dewdney in 1985 in the Computer Recreations column of Scientific American. The column was collected in his 1988 book The Armchair Universe.

You can zoom in and out or pan around the set with the keys as shown at the bottom of the image. The image is usually recalculated fairly quickly, but I’ve noticed that there is an occasional delay, I don’t know why. Reload the page to start over.

I got an IBM PC clone with an 8086 CPU in 1988. My first two pieces of software for the computer were Microsoft Flight Simulator, and Turbo C, the C compiler from Borland. One of the early exercises I tried as I learned C was to write a program to display the Mandelbrot set, using the algorithm described by Dewdney.

My program took 30 minutes or so to generate a 640 x 480 VGA image. Eventually I installed an 8087 floating-point coprocessor, which sped up the calculations quite a bit, to maybe 15 minutes. It’s still incredible to me to ponder the speed of modern CPUs compared to those early days.

Since then, whenever I have tried to learn a new programming language, I have written a version of Mandelzoom in that language. This version is a port of my Processing version to p5js.

I’m not sure but I suspect that there are more modern, improved algorithms for generating the Mandelbrot set, but I haven’t looked into it; for now I just stick with the algorithm as described in The Armchair Universe. I need to do more experimenting with color, but the current palette seems to work.