Ask HN: At which moment did you realise that you are built for computer science?

Re:Ask HN: At which moment did you realise that you are buil... by revscat on Thursday July 28, 2022 @10:49AM (#32265102)

In 1987 there was a pop-science book called “Chaos” by James Gleick that was, naturally, about chaos theory. At one point it described things like Mandelbrot/Julia sets and their ilk. There was one page that had a footnote at the bottom that described the algorithm used to generate a Mandelbrot set.

I had a PCjr, which was an 8088. Very slow, EGA graphics. 256k RAM. I did have a 20Mb hard drive, though.

I wanted to verify that algorithm, though. So I bought some books on how to program in C from Waldenbooks. After not too long I managed write a program to draw a Mandelbrot set on my PCjr. It was incredibly slow: I watched it paint each pixel, and let it run for many hours before I would get a complete set. But after much trial and error, it worked.

I was 16 years old. It was the first thing I had ever done that I was really proud of.

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Re:Ask HN: At which moment did you realise that you are buil... by chipmonkey75 on Thursday July 28, 2022 @02:10PM (#32268124)

Almost the same experience here; I have great nostalgia for that feeling, and the waiting for hours to finish. Nice to hear similar stories from someone else! I still have my copy of "Chaos", and it was (and still is) awesome, but another book I got around the same time was "Chaos, Fractals, and Dynamics", which included pseudocode, that I had to rewrite into Commodore-64 compatible BASIC.

I'd coded prior to this; I got my Commodore when I was like 11 (the family machine, but I used it by far the most). Mostly typing in games from magazines, but fractals were the first thing that felt like it was "computer science" - something that really explores a new space that just wouldn't be possible without a computer.

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Re:Ask HN: At which moment did you realise that you are buil... by tlocke on Thursday July 28, 2022 @11:02AM (#32265297)

I read that same book, maybe a year or two later than you, and also wrote a program to draw a Mandelbrot set on a BBC Model B in my first year at Uni.

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Re:Ask HN: At which moment did you realise that you are buil... by revscat on Thursday July 28, 2022 @11:57AM (#32266085)

What did you write it in? Was yours similarly slow?

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Re:Ask HN: At which moment did you realise that you are buil... by beej71 on Thursday July 28, 2022 @01:42PM (#32267780)

You and I did exactly the same thing. :)

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