Re:Show HN: Old School Graphics Algorithms
by sliken on Monday July 08, 2019 @07:06PM
(#20387604)
The reminds me of the the days before affordable color bitmap displays. I wrote a unix program to render the mandlebrot set in greyscale. Then a VMS program to render the greyscale image into postscript.
I was in a university lab with a 8 foot long laser printer that normally spit out 200 pages per minutes or so with the first page being a giant ascii rendering of your username. It made a cool frewp noise with each page shot out into a self collating set of shelves. The vast majority of the output was just ascii.
My mandelbrot set kept the printer busy for a few minutes, the operator wanted to reboot. I pleaded with them to leave it run. It finally spit out a page at at least 300 dpi, everyone in the lab came to look and was amazed. Back in those days rending a 3150x2250 part of the mandelbrot set was a substantial amount of compute. These days something like that runs at 60 fps.
I was in a university lab with a 8 foot long laser printer that normally spit out 200 pages per minutes or so with the first page being a giant ascii rendering of your username. It made a cool frewp noise with each page shot out into a self collating set of shelves. The vast majority of the output was just ascii.
My mandelbrot set kept the printer busy for a few minutes, the operator wanted to reboot. I pleaded with them to leave it run. It finally spit out a page at at least 300 dpi, everyone in the lab came to look and was amazed. Back in those days rending a 3150x2250 part of the mandelbrot set was a substantial amount of compute. These days something like that runs at 60 fps.